Monday, December 30, 2019

Great Mistakes, Hong Kong Eyes, 2019




ecoutez oval dar beim jaki lynx (listen to the album here)

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/great-mistakes-2019

"I just passed
a swoony time on earth. I did not dig
that there was more"
-- Charles Olson

saying this album was composed in one day is a great lie. and yet, very little has been heard or previewed before today and everything bearing upon it's current incarnation stands transformed by a hard 12 hours or so of hammering and bellowing the forge, those two contrary actions, the yield of which is what passes as a sign here, and what remains on the heap to be heard and taken in by one's own meaning. apex of the eccentric mood of this year of perplexity, angst, heightening. oddly enough, achievements in themselves, joys even.

the sound of us stretches back here at least until 2017 in a few cases. when I say "us", I mean, the sounds were in my care and they did not find place in publications anywhere else until now. some of the sounds come from Jacek Zielinski (tracks 1, 5, 8) and Filippo Panichi (Hong Kong Eyes).

there are sources in Creative Commons that I should find and provide attribution for in in the coming days as I've drawn on interviews and radio transmissions captured on the fly over the past year and a half that are elusive to my memory at the moment but not anonymous. Hang in there, my teams of neurons bees working on that. field recordings come from bulgaria, berlin, krakow and poznan. i play guitars, piano, electronic devices and percussion on site and in the studio (which can be the stairwell or the attic as the case may be).

The album cover was snatched from a post by Eric Wong. Apparently the wash-down of the protest slogan from the walls in Hong Kong.
 

 released December 30, 2019

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/great-mistakes-2019

Saturday, December 28, 2019

Out-sourcing Invocation to Ayahuma

Helloooooo! Sorry for the strange weblog post but I'm exploring new ways of sharing without FB...



listen once on a lower volume -- or loop -- but also read -- below

"Mankind has obviously reached the end of something"
 -C L R James,
   "Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity"
(thanks Hap. Savage, for the icing on the cake)

pull the stone out that plugs the bottom of the well
for the water's gone rotten with whatever they've been feeding
let the feed grow wild or forgotten
and let living waters sprinkle the air
living waters from flying rivers
free music has a record of it's own social order
not it's great scare but in it's care
free music beholds bee-cause
free music bees aware
the one about whom there is only one story
in the mansion of hives
in the dark rooms of developing alchemy
in the forest paved with yellow-gold leaves
photonic consciousness vibrates the phi mo
in the the trans-cranial ultra-sound
the strange song called zenzsen
mercury mediated the higher poisons into tincture
the mana pill every chicken knows what's best
the mano podersosa
every eagle knows what's best
the pineal thrill
every owl knows
her flesh of atoms & molecules woven
ayahuma alone doesn't know
ayahuma alone doesn't care
yet creating all beckons
the dissolution

Sunday, December 22, 2019

On Parables, Kafka, Olga Tokarczuk and The Problem of Out Laws


listen here by the click
 https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/the-problem-of-our-laws-op-389-201

is there too much music? too many people? too many ideas? or not enough love? there are so many things one could say. one of which is there are too many opinions and look here comes another one although look at how it adds up to a kind of polyphony of noise

more often I think there are too many non-listeners. other times I think there's not enough quiet around the listening, as if one had to transform the experience immediate back into logos, speech. the surrounding and settling of the contents in the listening is never allowed to happen. is this because music has become too much like discourse or too defined by discourse?

these things I say inside the noise above 
-- among the noise of other things and peoples --

  one can't deal with the overload as an individual. Either there there really really is is too too too too too too much information or there is in fact no information at all. oh no...

one model of communication asserts that the person has to already know the message they are seeking in order to be able to receive the message when it is sent. this is why there is a tremendous amount of nostalgia posting about the music of the past, as if we are seeking a reassuring narrative and through this the message we've conditioned ourselves to look for will undoubtedly arrive. In this sense there's not too much music but not enough anti-music. 

   Herbert Brun's idea was that it is only in anti-communication that the composer creates the condition in which the listener must find a meaning or a message that has not been predetermined

   Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross over to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.
     Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid yourself of all your daily cares.
    Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
    The first said: You have won.
    The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
   The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
 BUT, HOLD ON A MINUTE! Q: WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT?


   The Parable of the Problem of Our Laws, written by Franz Kafka, sprang to mind (--> wiki link -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Our_Laws ) -- within the howl of these recent images from Gaza, it shook my mind, again. These impressions combined with the messages streaming through Olga Tokarczuk's recent Nobel Prize speech -- all flowed together in this new sono-podcast, this evolving audio-poem, with synthesizer, shortwave radio, percussion, voice, performed live in the studio. Some words are my own gathered up from scraps of paper and given breath again but the vast majority belong to a passage of Olga Tokarczuk's text (see footnote). The other messages recombine as new sensations, margins of electromagnetic information. With thanks to Karolina Ossowska --without whom I'd have likely not read Olga's work and a special thanks to Tom Carter for the "is there too much music" question, which sparked again the movement towards the anti-music, the unanswerable question... 

https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/the-problem-of-our-laws-op-389-2019

   "The Problem of Our Laws" (German: "Zur Frage der Gesetze")

    The story is a short narrative, where laws of the land are described as esoteric, created by the elite. Thus, being such they are out of the hands by the common people, yet binding. Nobility is seen as the authority, the creator and executor of laws, yet completely separate from those whom they apply to. Yet, these laws create a sense of security among those who follow them, an empty one, since they are in fact a type of cruel joke. Incidentally, the story echoes the labyrinthine system of law and regulations in place among the official in Kafka's earlier novel, The Castle

 Olga Tokarczuk  -- Nobel Prize Winner in Literature for 2018 -- she writes:

    "The flood of stupidity, cruelty, hate speech and images of violence are desperately counterbalanced by all sorts of “good news,” but it hasn’t the capacity to rein in the painful impression, which I find hard to verbalize, that there is something wrong with the world. Nowadays this feeling, once the sole preserve of neurotic poets, is like an epidemic of lack of definition, a form of anxiety oozing from all directions."
  
     Today our problem lies—it seems—in the fact that we do not yet have ready narratives not only for the future, but even for a concrete now, for the ultra-rapid transformations of today’s world. We lack the language, we lack the points of view, the metaphors, the myths and new fables. Yet we do see frequent attempts to harness rusty, anachronistic narratives that cannot fit the future to imaginaries of the future, no doubt on the assumption that an old something is better than a new nothing, or trying in this way to deal with the limitations of our own horizons. In a word, we lack new ways of telling the story of the world.
   
      We live in a reality of polyphonic first-person narratives, and we are met from all sides with polyphonic noise. What I mean by first-person is the kind of tale that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who more or less directly just writes about herself and through herself. We have determined that this type of individualized point of view, this voice from the self, is the most natural, human and honest, even if it does abstain from a broader perspective. Narrating in the first person, so conceived, is weaving an absolutely unique pattern, the only one of its kind; it is having a sense of autonomy as an individual, being aware of yourself and your fate. Yet it also means building an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be alienating at times.

      Paradoxically, however, this situation is akin to a choir made up of soloists only, voices competing for attention, all traveling similar routes, drowning one another out. We know everything there is to know about them, we are able to identify with them and experience their lives as if they were our own. And yet, remarkably often, the readerly experience is incomplete and disappointing, as it turns out that expressing an authorial “self” hardly guarantees universality.

      What we are missing—it would seem—is the dimension of the story that is the parable. "

Monday, December 9, 2019

Jeff Gburek_Ephia_Keith Rowe: Live at Lida Project, Denver, Colorado. Full Recording.




   Some of you may not have known me long enough to know my obsessions and concerns. For 10 years I worked intensively with butoh, body-work, audio-spatiality (once called "psycho-acoustics") and improvisational music with the dancer Ephia Gburek
  The project was called Djalma Primordial Science   www.djalma.com   The subject of this weblog post however is the newly released digital album that documents one of Djalma Primordial Science's meetings with Keith Rowe, founding member of AMM, the person who has, as far as I can tell, still has the cap (feathered) for prepared guitar, as having taken it the furthest. 
  That this was a meeting between artists who took improvisation as a kind of sacrament should not be lost on the person who would listen to these pauses where distance overwhelms the front-lines in fog. This is what happened there in a there no longer there since this is also in a sense a field recroding of a demolished theater space in Denver called the Lida Project. 
   Further details on the Bandcamp page. 
 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/djalma-primordial-science-with-keith-rowe-lida-project-denver-2003
   Jeff Gburek: electro-acoustic guitar on the table, low-input mixer, field recordings. 
   Ephia: movement, stones, bones, vocal tones. 
   Keith Rowe: prepared guitar.

  In addition to thanking Ephia and Keith Rowe for this experience and these memories, I should add a few names. For one, Alana Deloach, who's set up the show at Lida Project. And we should thank the Lida Project itself as an organ, a cave for the imagination, as sonorous space now only in the arcana of our memories and the resonance one can hear in this recording. The other person to thanks is Ian Douglas-Moore who was the first responder to the emergency calls I made to record and music shops in Denver to find amplifiers for Keith to use. Additional thanks to whoever put us up that night. Special shouts out go to the wonderful people we met in Denver subsequent to than evening and who would invite I and Ephia back to perform several more times. 


Sunday, December 1, 2019

"Art is a broken form of magic." Notes on the margins of Helmut Lachenmann's Interculturality & Composition Keynote Speech



   Many years ago now, in 2006 or 2007, I attended Darmstadt's Fereinkurse Fur Neu Musik. Given a scholarship to attend it was difficult to refuse the offer and I accepted without any clear idea why I was going there other than my label in Germany suggested I do it. All I knew of Darmstadt was that Stockhausen and Cage and Cardew taught there. Looking at the list of the faculty I was not familiar with anyone other than Rohan de Saram (who I'd heard perform with Arditti Quartet) and the composer Helmut Lachenmann whose works had interested me since it seemed he had strategies similiar to the electro-acoustic music I was hearing and playing myself in Berlin. I had not read anything written by him and all I had heard left me on the edge of the an incomprehensible sense of adventure in composing. Oddly, this influenced me to go entirely in the opposite direction of composing for other people but rather in expanding my listening capacities and following his lead in the search for compositional material in noise and apparent silence. In a sense, this is ancient history for me now. I seem to have gone far afield or to have abandoned entirely this realm of music even though the courage I feel in going on derives from no influence more obvious to me that his own person. When I showed him my "composition" at one lecture, which consisted of nothing more than a schematic diagram of my current set-up for prepared guitar, piezo boards, electronics, feedback systems, granular synthesis, he paused and said "you know, if you have developed your own system, no one else can tell you what to do or how to proceed". This simple remark would prove to be very inspiring on many levels not least of which was bring me to address the question myself whether or not I had indeed created my own system. I spent years refining down to the most rudimentary elements, refusing to use Abelton, writing my own PD patches and then cracking electronic boards and wiring things in the way that still results in my set-up time taking much longer than the average sound technician can stand.
  
   In any case, I took to liking Lachenmann quickly because he turned out to be the most humorous and open-minded of all the people I had met there. A few lunch sessions were spent talking about the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, Herbert Brun & others -- and Herr Lachenmann tilted his head at one moment, looked me in they eye and said, "I see you read books." For once in recent memory I felt at home and happy that I didn't have to hide the facts of my fetish. Other talks with George Aperghis who admired and encouraged my graphic scores and these exchanges with Lachenmann, whose lectures I attended in German, Italian and English remain with me unto this day and in the time being in Darmstadt (a great culture shock from my dwelling in Berlin), allowed me to wade through the week of cold, luke-warm and bristly contact with the younger representatives of the European new music elite. People from the USA helped as well since they were in no mood to merely sit through concerts and lectures and young composers presentations and they managed to get a local pub to permit us to stage noise and improvised music sets in the later evenings.


   In keeping with the tradition I established, I have kept these notes un-edited. They are a direct transcription of what I heard that day. The title alone was added to my old website and I've sent it in emails and posted it in this way to several forums. I continue this tradition of transparency today even though I could not resist a few editorial interventions (in red)



   Attempt at fragmentary recovery of main features of lecture OHNE TITEL given by Helmut Lachenmann and translated live by Wieland Hoban (an amazing feat in and of itself given the complexity of the ideas & that there was no transcript and Wieland seemed to be staring into the space in front of him like a Sybil or a medium transmitting messages from the ether) .
   Structural note: the bullets are points he laid out and then went back over more sporadically. I was so taken by what he was saying that I didn't write each header down.)

   (Lachenmann makes joke about west meets east as "west eats meat")
-- allusion to the presence of Ravi Shankar in Darmstadt, spoken of later --

1) parasitism of an exhausted (western) society
2)
3) experiments/open ears for…/difference…difficulties…china
4) Nishida/Kyoto school of thought—interface with west
5) Necessity of the euro-centric concept of art (vessel for recovery of analytic diasporadic fragmentation)
6) Shared characteristics of cultures of music as (ritual) evocation of the numinous presence of communal well being
7)
8)
9) European consciousness of art and its relationship to rupture as constructive and intuitive intervention
10) Definition of this rupture with the breaking with/of the magic and precedent to the purification/delivery into (well-being)
11) All great works of art dominated through and through by spirit (structure as formalism is useless to attain to spirit…Nono: refusal to teach Lachenmann until he studied Renaissance art and learned spirit dominates great works main preoccupation)
12) euro-logo-centrism as related to progress and globalism as part of the parasitic and the search for exotic products of global culture—infection of globalism.
13) All one can do to change world is to consistently apply one’s own apparatus for enlightenment in order to renovate culture. This may seem like an intellectual process but in fact it is not and requires more than intellect to be carried out.
14) The misguided form of protest against parasitism in the supermarket of ideas—intellectual obsession, empty cultural critiques, world music, fun, tv, diversion and sport -- as all leading to conservatism of un-reflective culture
15) The attitude of the post-modern is to ask the audience “what do you want?” “how do you like it?” and this illuminates the situation of consumerism and entertainment culture that surrounds and conditions the reception of art and art production itself

Then he elaborates on the points jumping around.

Suspicion of the intercultural parasitism, search for exotic and “intact” culture as panacea rather than focus on renovating exhausted western culture and its own problems. Says in 1968 he used first Chinese gongs in piece—an angry audience interrupts the performance—we can only fight this reactionary feeling in the world by understanding our own positions as Western composers and how we overstep limitations. Says he later learned how offensive were the techniques he applied to the gongs—as if he were a barbarian to torture them in that way.

 To the European he wants to say that something has come to disturb the peace of the concert hall and western culture must find its own way to create using its own means not to rely on appropriating forms from imaginary gods of an external unfallen culture. The secret magic of ogaku, gamelan, Indian music moves something very deeply in our souls which is more important than art itself but it also carries information and it oxidizes toward an aesthetic position in the West with new possibilities. In 1957 there was a concert at Darmstadt of Stockhausen, Nono, Adorno and the Ravi Shankar. Lachenmann was 21 years old. An analytical composer—scolded by Nono for not appreciating that spirit guides all great works of art—Lachenmann said he felt this music left him a guest at the borders of a paradise. Shankar was still then a foreign world, there were no records yet really of this world and Indian cultural contacts with Europe were vague. How could he return the next day to his laboratory of analytical, technoid (sic) procedures? He spent a very uneasy night thinking Shankar’s art seemed to threaten the very existence of music itself with a force immensely greater than music. But the next day, he found himself able to resume his analytical music and laboratory studies in a renewed form imbued with a vigorous utopian feeling, determined to erode and dissolve music itself and return to the basic material of sound.

The musical practice of all cultures is certainly an invocation of some kind of numinous irrational force coming together in a collectively magical ritual. Stravinsky: music or art is the union of that which is most close to us with that which is the most high.

He recounts hearing Goebbels on the radio and the horror in realizing that the Nazi were actually practicing some kind off black magic hypnotism.
Music functions and spreads its effects throughout the world. In every techno club, baroque concert, rock concert, schlager band and concert hall (although he feels he must very cautiously proceed when he says this) we can see that there is a kind of magical ritual involved that conceals a desire for unity. Nowhere have we been able to abstain from such magical rituals. At all price levels the magic becomes a commodity and form of control which the culture industry lives off of. He says he does not feel prepared to talk about the depth of this process but starts of the topic with a recognition that music has always seemed to be some kind of attempt to communicate with gods but that, at least in the western tradition of Christian religion colored by Greek philosophy, the first points of polyphony (as a kind of metaphor for the magical unity) are soon cast as structural elements wherein we enter the picture as human beings imbuing a substance with a form of enlightenment which is also threatened then by analysis, made separate from us and it is only through this alienation, this separation and loss of unity that there is then possible the return to grace through the medium of music presented as a god-feast (sic).

He seems to set up a dialectic dynamic: composition (as structural creation and criticism combined) is equated with the Fall. While the realization or incarnation again is the concert which signifies a kind of re-unification of elements scattered into bits inside the score.

Art then is a form of broken magic. The brokenness precedes the evocation. Negation as sublation of the function that promised us security in the performance is a kind of rupture that brings about a desire in us for sensuous and sometimes erotic feeling, a wounding to the heart and a kind of transgression that also implies a kind of conflict with culture and its taboos but the process of cultural creation must be re-examined and brought to the area which its enlightenment gains access to the potential communion in this magical event. The European virus even as it is practiced in art—transforming the world perniciously—can only be remedied through a thorough exploration and experimentation with all elements being questioned down to the basic aspect of sounds.

It might be that the only religion that is wise enough to assist in this process and it is with Zen that is recognizes its own limitations. There must come something is the situation of “worship” that threatens to destroy the worship, a breaking away, if there is to be any reunification at all.