Episode 49 - Bryan Lewis Saunders

Original Description:

Today on the show is performance artist, stand up tragedy performer, poet, painter, and… There isn’t really a word for a lot of what Bryan Lewis Saunders does.

You may have heard of Bryan Lewis Saunders a few years back when the internet suddenly became aware of his mission to create at least one self portrait a day for the rest of his life. Or, more specifically, a strange overblown period in which he created 50-60 self-portraits under the influence of different drugs (for context, he clams to have completed over 10,000 portraits now).

So, we don’t talk about that much. If you want to read a little more about that and where Saunders currently lives, I’d suggest the piece Jon Ronson wrote on him for the Guardian a few years back. Just ignore the sensationalist, misleading headline.

We talk more about his collaborations with noise musicians, his sleep speak recordings, his work performing psychological tests on himself, and his recent exhibits in which he was tortured on stage. In fact, I don’t speak a whole lot at all–I mostly ask a question and then just laugh for 10 minutes as he goes off on intensely surreal tangents.

And finally, I need to thank and acknowledge the contributions of frequent guest, Arvo Zylo. At the end of his interview he had offered to send me a list of other guest suggestions, the first of which ended up being Bryan Lewis Saunders.

Because of Saunders’s frequent collaborations with noise musicians, often recording a spoken word piece and then sending it to musician to do what they will with, and because I’ve been listening to a lot of Over The Edge and experimental Australian radio, I decided to take another stab at soundtracking and doing small edits to the interview.

The majority of the music is from a previously unused three hour piece of Arvo’s titled, BLOODBATH. Arvo had originally been commissioned to compose it for a gallery, but the gallery went bust before opening and the track was doomed to an obscured spot on little seen archive.org playlist alongside 3-10 minute long pieces.

The other piece is an excerpt from the Pleasure Tunnel collaboration between Arvo and Bryan. You can hear more about that in the bonus episode we posted yesterday. You can also find where to buy one of the few remaining cassette copies here.