Warwick, UK

The Rites of Passage, by the Belgian anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, was one of the first studies of initiation rites. Van Gennep established a general framework of initiation rituals, suggesting that a person is re-created as a social individual through these rites. Van Gennep outlined three stages in such rites, which transform the social identity of the initiand: pre-liminal rites, essentially rites of separation that detach the individual from their former status; liminal (or threshold) rites, where the initiand is in ‘limbo’, having been detached from their former status but not yet attached to the new; and post-liminal rites in which the initiand is reincorporated into society, the passage from the old status to the new is symbolically consummated. Van Gennep also established an analogous relationship between society and the house:

“A society is similar to a house divided into rooms and corridors. The more the society resembles ours (the Western, Modern society) in its form of civilisation, the thinner are its internal partitions and the wider and more open are its doors of communication. In a semicivilised society, on the other hand, sections are carefully isolated, and passage from one to another must be made through formalities and ceremonies…”

The cassette covers that I designed to adorn the albums and live performances of the German experimental noise band Lustfaust can be seen from an analogo us point-of-view. The band were famed (or more appropriately infamed) for their primitive recordings and caustic concert performances. These performances often challenged and brought to question the status of the listener or spectator.

Under these terms the British anthropologists Mary Douglas’ reference to Van Gennep’s original analogy between the house and society underlines the value of Lustfaust as a transitional space in music history:

“…Van Gennep…saw society as a house with rooms and corridors in which passage from one to another is dangerous. Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others.”

Danger did indeed exist in both the recordings and performances, both the physical and the psychic and I’m very happy to say that I was there to be challenged and that the designs I created bear witness to this - and my own - transition.