Penny Rimbaud & Mikado Koko Acts of Love / Songs to Our Other Selves Vinyl LP 2023

LP1: Acts of Love
Tracks 1-50

LP2: Songs to Our Other Selves
Tracks 1-20

Caliban Sounds in association with One Little Independent Records are delighted to present a 180g heavy weight double vinyl, in a gatefold sleeve; Penny Rimbaud’s ‘Acts of Love’ (1984) accompanied by Mikado Koko’s ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’ (2022). It’s presented with the ‘Acts of Love’ 32-page booklet and ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’ insert. The latter available on vinyl for the first time, these collector’s items are limited to only 1000 copies.

Having in 1977 co-founded the anarchist band Crass, by 1984 Rimbaud felt he needed to explain both the political and personal roots of what increasingly was being seen by press and public alike as the band’s “violent anger”. However, in this respect Rimbaud had always concurred with Che Guevara who had stated that “the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love”. What better, then, than to return to ‘Acts of Love’, to be presented this time as a 12” vinyl. Rimbaud would compose the music to feature Eve Libertine on vocals and Paul Ellis on keyboards. Meanwhile, Vaucher set about creating a new set of illustrations to accompany the poems.

In 2021, avant-garde musician and artist, Mikado Koko, being a keen admirer of Libertine’s vocals, and having a great fondness for ‘Acts of Love’, contacted Rimbaud with the idea of creating cut-ups of twenty tracks from the album to create a sister release entitled ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’’. When finally he heard the result, he was overjoyed and the album was released in 2022 on Caliban Sounds. Sean Worrall wrote in The Organ, “Mikado Koko has taken Penny Rimbaud’s album ‘Acts of Love’, originally a fifty track album of short poems on love, and cut it up, deconstructed it, reconstructed it, pulled it apart and put it all back together (a lot more than just remixed it) to make a twenty track album of her own. ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’ is an entirely new album, that we’re told that, and rightly so, we should view as a continuation of the original. What we have here are bites, stabs, thrusts of Crass-like noise, art, the art of noise. It is hard-boiled, it is challenging, it might be madness or maybe maddening, the whole thing is glorious actually. Those bites of words, the cut and paste deconstruction, the thrust, words caught, the art of collage, the real art of glorious noise, painting with sound”