Composer & host Charlie Morrow in conversation down memory lane with Charlemagne Palestine, Brooklyn-born polymath artist & musician, early champ of NY- minimalist music but also a self-described MAXimalist, stuffed animal aficionado, percussionist, carilloneur, [church] organist – & entertaining storyteller.

© photo: Plamen Hubenov. He got his start singing Jewish traditional songs but quickly moved at age 12 to performing for more unorthodox performers such as the Beats, playing back up percussion for the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Anger, Tiny Tim. He also emerged as a sought-after carillonneur @ NY’s St. Thomas Episcopal Church & others.

He has collaborated with Tony Conrad, Morton Subotnik, Simone Forti, electronica duo Pansonic, Michael Gira, Janek Schaefer, Rhys Chatham, David Coulter … He is often accompanied by his menagerie of stuffed animals. Palestine has performed all over the globe & has put out LPs on renowned labels such as Staalplaat, Baroni, New World Records, Sub Rosa, Algha Marghen. He moved to Brussels in the late 1990s.

Subject matter: “Palestine: My name & the should-be country,” carillons, mutual friends, Moondog, Tony Conrad, Allen Ginsberg, Dutch Schultz, the Jewish Mafia, Queens, Laguardia, Tiny Tim, bongos, weed dealer, Moses Asch, Folkways, gamelan, Charlemagne – holy Roman emperor, Charlotte Moorman, Morton Subotnik, Jerome Rothenberg, Vito Acconci, Belgium, tramping around, Pansonic, Mike Vainio, CM Hausswolff, Magoos Bar in Tribeca, David Toop, dimensional sound, Johnny Ray [“Little White Cloud That Cried”], Children’s Hour television program, falsetto, CBS documentary studios, NYC record libraries, Warhol, Taylor Mead, Jack Smith, Dick Higgins, Herbert Marcuse & Disney, drone organ works, Sibelius Museum – Finland …

Finnish actor Santeri Karl-Henrik Kinnunen, the son of 2 actor-parents, found early immersion spending time on a farm as a Helsinki city child. There he became utterly fascinated by horses, learning to ride & go somewhere else with his thoughts & dreams, immersed in the countryside.

Kinnunen is a veteran of the Helsinki City Theatre & has acted in the KOM Theater as well as the Finnish National Theatre. He is also a veteran of many Finnish film & television productions.

His second immersion was losing himself to rediscover himself in his acting roles in stage productions such as MacBeth & in films such as A Charming Mass Suicide, Matti: Hell Is for Heroes, & Hellsinki.

But his strangest pleasure as a professional actor is as a voice actor for which he supplies the Finnish voice of Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story series & Captain John Smith in Pocahontas. He finds it fascinating that he can find immersion using his voice even if they’re only the disembodied voices of animated 2-dimensional characters…

The Swede Anders Kreuger is a curator, writer & educator. He has been the director of the renowned Kohta Gallery in Helsinki since 2019. Prior to that, he was the senior curator at HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, the director of the Malmö Art Academy, & was a member of the Programme Team for the European Kunsthalle in Cologne. He was a founding member of the Nordic Council of Minsters Information Office in Vilnius, served as the director of the Nordic Arts Center in Helsinki & has served on the editorial board of the London-based art journal Afterall as well as the Ghent journal A Prior.

He has also worked as an independent curator, organizing numerous exhibitions throughout Europe. He has taught at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, Royal College of Art in London, & other European art academies. Served as an advisor to the Raqs Media Collective at Manifesta 7 in Bolzano. Anders Kreuger regularly writes essays for catalogues & journals, & has edited numerous publications.

He has been deeply & personally immersed in words, reading, & language since his childhood experiences immersed in reading children’s books. As a curator he thrives on how words affect his work as a curator & loves working with, for & through people as his way of constructing a situation that allows the viewer to become immersed in an exhibition.

I met Anders in Helsinki through Martti Aiha, the acclaimed Finnish artist known as Mara, a long time friend of my wife, librettist Maija-Leena Rems. Mara, sadly recently deceased, was on the founding board of Kohta Gallery. Anders & I had many conversations about shamanism & the influence of the oldest ideas on the contemporary world. Growing from this shared interest, Anders created the gallery show, Charlie Morrow, A Gathering which included Winter Solstice Celebration with musicians around the world. Currently, he is curating the Yes & No Tation gallery show which is paired with Sound Circus, a public event.

Subjects discussed: Telepathy, AI, immersion, written language, thought before language, reading minds, inducing immersive states, seeing images in objects, shamans, origin & development of language, Chomsky, galleries, curation, museums, cave paintings, dream singing, desire to connect, Stalin, Finland, comparative linguistics, arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, Cratylus, Andaman Islands, Navajo, Elias Canetti, Fascism, Trumpianism, color theory, Kandinski, & so much more…