The Falls of Hyperion

   
The Falls of Hyperion Karolina Ossowska Jeff Gburek 
recorded between September 2016--2017
     Field recordings heard on the album were captured in Romania,
Italy, Poland & Ireland. Instruments: Violins, Steel-String Guitar,
 Prepared Guitar, Microcassette, Thai Gongs, Hand-drum, Piano,
Inside Piano, Piezo Elements
(all reverb effects created by home-made plate echo),
Yamaha Keyboard, Goa Bells, Aluminum Gamelan, Voices, Snare,
Kocioł (Traditional Wielkopolska Tympani).
Texts: Lift Not The Painted Veil by P.B. Shelley
   & The Rushes by Jeff Gburek
Photographs & Cover Composition: Karolina Ossowska

 listen here:    https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-falls-of-hyperion

 

photo and composition by Karolina Ossowska

With a palpable sense of relief I pressed the "publish" button a few seconds, few days ago on the album (or sequence of compositions) I started thinking about in 2015 and despite what it says on the page, it began with a few violin passages I had asked Karolina to play in November 2015. The mood passed and the feeling would not return until the next autumn of 2016 when the 2 main tracks took the shape they retain here. The material spans our recent relocation to the other side of town and perhaps seals and allows us to release the quasi-rural life of Wilda (tongue firmly in cheek) and by the time October came round I had the final piece, Lift Not The Painted Veil, arranged, mapped and then executed all but for the poem that finally rained down with Orionid meteorite shower on October 21, which was rendered as voice-over on October 30th, 2017, in one sitting. There remains only to assemble the physical copies for the limited edition. Place your orders soon for those because both I and Karolina will be on the road over the Christmas/New Year's period. Sit back and listen, it's a long journey. Dreams and visions are the aim so fear not the veil. Be lifted. 

   listen here:    https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-falls-of-hyperion

In the core of the matter, the dark matter, in the hidden forces of nature which nature has yet to discover, as if in the first and last frontier of a mind that seeks to know, that seeks either science (demonstrable) or gnosis (intuitive): our theme. The first Hyperion is the one we know, by name, but even so, distantly, the Titan, the light-bearer, the high-one, star before the stars, the father of Helios and Selene, Eos and yet his own mother is Gaia, the Earth before the Earth as planet, the fiber of vibration in the cosmos. As one of the Titans who overthrew their father Ouranos, Hyperion and his ilk (not before giving birth to many other deities, among them Prometheus), are in turn overthrown, by the Olympians, then to suffer various forms of imprisonment, bondage and oppression. Titans living the life of an eternal underclass, defeated, untouchable gods. The otherness of Hyperion, the one of the Romantic traditions, specifically in these works: meditations on Keats' Hyperion Fragments. Keats with such hallucinatory musical language, that must stand alone, naked, on the page, sending it's tendrils of thoughts throughout various gravitational fields. Hyperion who struggles to awake and then struggles to sleep and remains a figure of insomnia or dreaming, as if a kind of background radiation, messages of the unborn impulse potential in nature before the nature of human colonization. These voices we would like to hear on the horizon our sounds call into. Dangling over the abyss of all languages. These are the sirens and the whistling caves on the edge of the sound.

photo by Hubert and Monika Wińczyk

Curtains of Silence, Open (Late November Poems)

        with this ring of light thee I wed
     those thoughts of which fallen
      through the net abounding
    calm the hellish down
       and pet the duck
       it's light photons of fire
      penetrate water
        and that is earthly all
                                                                                                 
                23.nov.AM


=  ====(((((((((((((*********))))))))))))====  =


and I thinking in one night
who reads the odyssey
or whether dreams cancel reality
and vice versa while walking in the błoto
around lake named after nymphs Rusałka
dream on paper boat sailor Rimbaud
did not Ginsberg address himself to Pound
Ezra when decrying
no herms in those mounts
a question for who knows
et who wants to fathom such
imaginary hand-shakes

nov23, late light

    Curtains of Silence, Open


             I
  
   new tape title ideas become poem accidentally by
"jeff gburek is a new name for me", he said,
 an old one for me said I
--on the birth and life of another mother for Edmund Husserl --
   we know dendrites meet dandruff unknowing the bend of the real round of the corner--
  of the split-ends we mend together, the synaptic hand-shake
we share, the maps unraveling crease & tear, speak of
context being everything when everything is nothing
 a chapter not a book a page unturning, tricklings
 and like a outworn map, the tectonic plates of the earth rend

          II

  a flash of fog, I mean of light
(photonic slivers, slits)
as if within the sterile beams a truck
struck an asteroid
avoiding a frog
while the spider insider
weaves the garrulous gloom
sucking blackholes
from behind the moons
that Ophelia strung
on the clothesline
for your eyes alone
to ponder in the floral
wilderness of berry 
  
                 III

           that's the bunker where they bury
           the closet of tattle-tale
           clinker and clank of Cytadela
           be they keys or rattles
           wooden hollows
           the things they drape
           the robes upon
           one guesses aghast
           and walks by quickly
           stuttering numbers
           codes of prayer
           to let this now pass
           in peace between
           the two tall pines
           of the new year
           at last redeemed
           in the loss of name
             --they who fall into Earth
               become Earth
                without name--
         
             dawning there
           in skylark's cue
           to the night-thrush,
           blossom, Venus
           speed you, Saturn
           flare aware, take the aged young
           youthless Hyperion's
           glare away

    IV
          
these are the songs
of happiness and longings
yet to be invented
in the pent up sequence
that rejoins torn fractals
and run flesh over memory
as the one who died
once upon a time
forever in the rush
of water healing
the fragile nimbus
gourd for gathering
nutriment of promise

be held here, then, see
the pain of your stars'
receding cantation
in shifting texture
lightly by arms
as in birth
and eye crystalline,
guide you the flesh
and hands extended
openly in greeting
that year without year
rhymes as eternal
invisible lavender
extract of soul, yours,
for all to sense
freely in essence of day
 as nights first announcer
asleep as ever

    V
& the curtains of silence
hung about the horizon
draped about everything,
of the thing, shifting ever
what it is, as beckons
or beacons & with urgency
cloaks the normalized
perverse in mourning envy
roaring or sobbing
boring or 
sirens the webbed
sleep alive to
stir softly your
nobler organs
where to paint caves
 of primordial genius in hope
& earth, universal
turns the torus
equators anon


Coda,

a flash of fog came through
a sliver of photons
 dithering dew
fragile nimbus lord bearing
 a new name to us all
a name we cannot spell
the dendrites dripping
 hypertextual grins

some stars of words just floating in my cranium
 grazing, grassing
the ceilings of the brain

the tape itself, the torus of horus,
 the torah borealis, could be called
in the realm of the ultrapersonal

"curtains of silence hung about the thing"

and yet what do I know
that resides outside language
and knows much better?

11.30.2017