Chapped Lips

Peter Hope Chapped Lips (2021)
You may recall Peter Hope as vocalist of the Box, or from any of his more recent expeditions on the fringes of music where jazz, noise, and blues turn out to be different expressions of more or less the same thing. Chapped Lips, which we should probably term an existential monologue for want of a better description, seems to be a variant means of communicating that which was explored on recent albums by Hope's Exploding Mind. What that might be possibly depends on what the listener can hear - or the reader discerns in this case - but it's one of those deals where there's really no reliable shorthand for what happens. Simply you have to read the thing and get through to the other side, although helpfully this edition also comes with a CDR of the author reading the text in full, which you could probably call an audiobook if you felt so inclined.

Viewed from one angle, Chapped Lips seems to be Hope's assessment of his own place within the broader span of human existence, and of his own existence, and whether any of it means or amounts to anything - narrated as a stream of consciousness illustrated with metaphors and particularly tactile images. The impression garnered from both reading and listening is deceptively surreal - possibly I mean hyperreal - and vaguely hallucinatory, despite that this train of thought follows a very specific, directed route with very little which seems random or accidental.

the fat man was back in the pool. he had an inflatable hippo penis sticking out from between his legs. he was pink and naked and chuckled loudly as he massaged and waved it around. there was a woman, two floors up, shouting, in what was probably Ukranian, with a coiled extension cable and a glowing three bar electric fire balanced on the handrail. and then the fat man and his penis floated apart.

There are other passages which better exemplify the main theme or themes of Chapped Lips, but I'm not sure they work in isolation. This territory can only be directly experienced and resists summary.

On a purely technical level, in the event of such observations being any use to anyone, being reasonable familiar with Peter Hope's recorded works, I knew this was at least going to be interesting. However, I'm genuinely astonished at the level of accomplishment here, the sophistication and subtlety of what is communicated. I'm not sure material operating by such degrees of introspection - or this structurally experimental for that matter - is particularly easy to pull off without it seeming like a random assemblage - see also the notion that Burroughs' cut-ups were simple because any kid can take a pair of scissors to a newspaper; but this is a masterpiece which communicates almost by means of its own language, hence the immersive quality by which the reader acclimates to that language.

Thirty or so pages is just about the right length for a narrative of such density, and is additionally conducive to being read again and again, as is probably necessary; but hopefully, on the strength of this, there may be more to come.