In November or December of 1984, Turner agreed to collaborate on an industrial-noise track with a musician friend, Heinrich Mannheim, who he knew through the S/M underworld. Mannheim’s band, Sublime Ascent, was at the extreme end of the thriving noise-music scene in Berlin in the eighties. They took their cue from bands like Whitehouse, whose aesthetic of extreme violence and sexual cruelty Mannheim considered the only cultural form immune to assimilation by the capitalist-consumer system. Sublime Ascent are reported to have incorporated images and video footage of war atrocities, executions and torture into their infrequent live shows. It has even been rumoured that, in one extremely secretive performance in a disused governmental premises on the fringes of either Frankfurt or Dresden, the band improvised a set to the prolonged, ritualistic killing of a consenting and ecstatic male, hands bound and on his knees, a series of cuts made on his naked torso.
The tapes said to have resulted from the collaboration between Sublime Ascent and Killian Turner have become the holy grail of Turner aficionados. On the recordings, Turner is thought to have read from a collage made up of his own texts and those of Georges Bataille, possibly spliced with certain passages from Sade and Nietzsche, and transcripts of the commentary from the 1982 World Cup. He read over a sprawling sound-texture that lurched between extreme noise and eerie, dark-ambient sonic wasteland, performed live by Sublime Ascent. Present at the recording was a forty-something man with long, greying hair and a bushy, black moustache who was never to be seen without his wraparound sunglasses, his overall appearance suggesting a somewhat seedier Carlos Santana. This was the figure Turner would refer to in his writings sometimes as Frank Lonely, but more often as Mother D. After watching the recording session whilst drinking several cups of herbal tea, Frank Lonely/Mother D remarked that he admired the text which Turner had read, or at least what he had understood of it (his English was imperfect), and thought he had recognised certain phrases from Georges Bataille. When the day’s recording was finished, the two men went out for a drink and ended up talking long into the night — about art, music, love and politics. Turner eventually stumbled back to his Friedrichshain apartment as a murky dawn broke over Berlin, rarely in his life having laughed or enjoyed himself so much.
The diaries Turner kept in the months immediately preceding his disappearance detail his intense, at times all-consuming friendship with Mother D. The two men shared a love for Bataille, for underground American rock bands like Suicide and Big Black, and, bizarrely, for most varieties of animated film, but especially those produced by the Disney corporation. Turner and Mother D would spend their weekends visiting cinemas all over the city, watching Bambi, The Jungle Book, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and whatever other feature-length cartoons they could find (they appear to have had no interest in shorter fare, such as animated TV series). ‘In the presence of Mother D I re-embody the child I never truly was,’ wrote Turner, ‘which in turn prepares me, spiritually if not fizzically [sic] for what is to come, i.e. the great radiance/the crossing/the sacred blah-blah-blah.’7
It was towards the end of July that Mother D introduced Turner to a friend and ex-lover of his named Anashka. Turner was instantly enthralled. Indeed, Anashka seems to have been a formidable figure, of no great beauty, perhaps, but with intense erotic allure. Born to a Russian mother in exile from the Soviet Union, and an Italian anarchist father, Anashka always wore a black beret and tight black jeans, though the rest of her apparel varied wildly. ‘The beret and jeans were the frame,’ wrote Turner. ‘The rest was the whirring reel. . of a film I could watch for ever.’ Anashka was twenty-nine and co-ran a gallery and performance space in Lichtenberg. She was also an artist who used the medium of dance, often augmented with vitriolic spoken-word outbursts and even, when the chemistry of a performance demanded it, physical assaults on her audience. One night she performed to an audience consisting solely of Turner, inan apartment borrowed from a friend who was visiting Poland. Turner was transfixed by the dance, which consisted for the most part of Anashka standing deathly still, wincing very occasionally, and emitting long, alarming shrieks even more infrequently. After almost three hours, Anashka collapsed to the floor and announced that the performance had concluded. Turner thanked her and asked her what the piece was called. Anashka thought about this for quite some time, before replying, Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. Turner and Anashka then made love on the floor of the apartment — an experience which astonished Turner. He was to write at length about this incident on several occasions, as if trying to coax out its core meaning by approaching it from multiple angles. ‘I cannot say’, he concluded, ‘whether the carnal fusion with Anashka was the greatest bliss of my life. . or the deepest horror.’
The day after Anashka’s performance, Mother D told Turner of an abandoned house in the countryside just outside Berlin, in the shadow of an Autobahn flyover. For months, he and Anashka had been talking about taking over the house and turning it into some kind of art space or music studio. Though nothing came of this intention, Mother D did drive Turner out to the house one unusually cold afternoon in early September. For Turner, whose mental state was most likely entering a stage of extreme deterioration, visiting the house was an experience of near-religious intensity. He had the sense of being in a place that existed outside of time, a primal, sacred and abyssal site, a ‘portal on to infinity’, where ‘good and evil are one, are nothing’. While it is not clear whether Turner continued to visit the house after Mother D had revealed its location to him, his writing immediately became fixated on the image of a dilapidated house, unoccupied, on the fringes of a vast post-industrial city. In what has become unofficially known as the House Sequence, written in a frenzy of productivity throughout that September, the structure is described as having cracked walls and smashed windows, and is overrun with weeds, yet radiates an intense, unearthly beauty. Across a broody strip of wasteland from the house, the broad, silent Autobahn soars indifferently past, ‘like mighty Quetzalcoatl’. In the opening variations of the sequence, the house stands serenely abandoned, crumbling and unwitnessed. Later, as the sequence gathers ‘a kind of entropic momentum’,8 Turner begins to introduce human presences into the scene. One, two or, at most, three figures appear, always in the middle of the afternoon. They enter the house through the side or back door, which creaks on its hinges, and walk silently through the dilapidation. Various images occur and dissolve: a couple mutedly make love on the dusty floor; a man hangs a painting on a cracked, bare wall and gazes at it for hours, tears running down his face (we never see what the picture represents); a solitary woman, clearly modelled on Anashka, enters a bedroom and lies on the damp floorboards where a bed might once have been. She lies there for a long time, gazing at the ceiling. She begins to masturbate, but stops before reaching orgasm. Darkness falls and still the woman has not moved. Suddenly we see her as a skeleton.
In the penultimate variation in the sequence, the house is the setting of a suicide. On a melancholy afternoon in autumn, a woman and a naked man watch in silence as a second man slits his wrists in the overgrown back garden. His body slumps to the ground and the man and woman stare at it for a long time (the moon rises, falls; the sun rises, falls). Then they leave. Finally, in what is both the termination of the House Sequence and the last of Killian Turner’s known writings, a man arrives at the house, alone, holding a pile of photographs. He spends the night walking from room to room, weeping occasionally. In each room he stops and looks at some of the photographs, sometimes letting one fall to the floor, or placing one on a mantelpiece or windowsill. Very early in the morning, he leaves the house, gets into a red car which he has parked nearby, and drives away. The car merges with the Autobahn that soars out and away from the city, towards an unknowable horizon.