Black Floyd (Davu Seru & Jeff Gburek)

For me on this end it's not easy being whitey on the moon in ghost town picking through memory skeletons of the holocaust nobody else sees. Hard to swim in local lakes knowing what went into tombstone maculate the eerie bottoms (search in this blog Rusalka water-walk, read if you care). If that isn't enough, the constant expansion of booty negritude on the virtual vevo vice channels in the received post-afro-futurism, where all the sweat and labor is off stage, sacrificed for the visual cannibals, leaves me troubled: when I think over the musical heritage of the USA where I cut my teeth doing anything (almost) and yet, it's easier to see, when I log into the news, the boot or knee or bullet on the neck on somebody whose ancestors served in the unconscripted armies of slaves that built the wealth of all nations*, well, it's enough. I'd even forgotten Big Floyd (of the Screw Tang clan) was the man down. When 8:46 it the stands, it was domino effective. Somehow that's how this album all got done so quickly. Energy from where it's taken. Entropy from where it's taken. 

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/black-floyd-jeff-gburek-davu-seru

Davu's Intro went this way...

 "Jeff Gburek lives in Poland but we first met in Boulder, CO, back in 2001 or 2. I was touring the bo-ho improvised music territory with some percussion instruments, beer and cigarettes.

I joined FB in 2008 when I was working a desk job in publishing and soon with family to worry about. In Saint Paul, MN. That's about when Jeff and I said hi again.

Despite the impression management scheme that social media infects us all with, I have admired Jeff from afar and am inspired by his integrity--you might even call him an artist. It is an honor to have made my favorite recording to date...with him...and Black Floyd.

You can begin to know me better here:

davuseru.com

In place of live performance, I have taken--for the first time--to multi-tracking.

Jeff submitted solo tracks via email, I listened for the lure, then bit. And then walked away to my garden where I would listen for it to dig and settle.

After deciding which instruments that I wanted to prepare (after interpreting the call) I set up the studio and improvised wearing headphones. Despite these being multi-track recordings,
I played with the consideration that I might someday be invited to perform the pieces; and, so, I limited my activity to something I might approximate live. The instruments include: drum set, glockenspiel (bowed and struck), 28" bass drum and voice.

All tracks were recorded at home directly to free software using a $40 USB microphone. Along with a little reverb, the silences that interrupt the drum set on "Breathing Gatha" are the only post-production edits.

--Davu Seru, June, 9, 2020 

But let the tale unfold further, before, after, while you listen, where Davu also explains the album's cover art, in the writing and photos at this link

 davuseru.com/2020/06/15/preview-black-floyd-akashic-records-2020/


 While Davu Serus lives in Minneapolis, USA and we met I'm pretty sure in Boulder in the drive-gates of Jack Wright's home in 2001 where I and Ephia Gburek had been hosted en route to New Mexico. I had quit smoking for the 3rd time by then.
  We noticed somewhere along the time-line shared passions for music, literature, an affinity for the queer turns of phrase that sign one's taste for the marginal & rebellious use of language one has to call poetic. My take, anyway. For the last few years there was always some speculation we'd wind up again on the same continent & share a stage. This year the speculation took a turn for the 99.999 percentile of extreme improbability with the panic of pandemic overwhelm. So we have hit the virtual pavement and mingled our composition and improvisation skill sets, wound up with this album.

 I played the Hoeffner electric guitar and the Microfreak synthesizer, simultaneously (no dubs) for an hour and sent a bundle of this to Davu who added via audacity (software) his drum & voice overdubbed in whatever order he knows better than I. That this order is the way the music falls together so quickly seems happy enough on its own and yet perhaps owes something to the urgency of the times. As my friend pointed out, we might say, we created something to celebrate, extra.
I should like to confess that while recording I projected myself out of my body. Had a change of shirt after getting back inside. Uneasy. The birth of the the album with the project named Black Floyd has a bitter root. But the cooperation heals and joins hands & let's us imagine something else

Wheels of Sound among the Yungdrung Bön

 Once again Transparent Abelard is blessed through the agency of Michael Northam with a gem in the realm of textures, textiles, twinkling on the dharma path, coming into view from the very compelling Nine Ways site of Raven Cypress Wood, link below

Called a wheel of sound it appears to me like a cross-world puzzle, a pan-acrostic, a work of concrete poetry, the Mongol calligrammes of an even more painterly Apollinaire, the himalyan gematria...

"Within the Yungdrung Bön religious tradition there is a style of poetry that is considered an advanced art and is often used to praise spiritual masters or states of realization. The poetic verse is written in a kind of graph in which each syllable is written within its own geometric space often in contrasting colors that form patterns or images. These syllables then intersect with other lines of poetry or verse. The arrangement of syllables must be made in such a way that they must make sense with each intersecting syllable."

https://ravencypresswood.com/2020/05/23/dra-khor-a-wheel-of-sound/?fbclid=IwAR3S4yZZo93kO6gHqAlyAwGlHyfsM-l2dRfzWZqL45RLNkqV167eSujcuUs

Lines Written in Trieste, 1992

"we ourselves intensify that resistance which the "obvious" has
to every demand made by that which is questionable"  -- heidegger

photo thanks to john elmanahi, great friend of life's ways

a poem facing all four winds at once, these whirlings

speaking through the wood of Miramare with tingled tongues

with doves & pigeons & rocks the language melted

trees hooting in the bachelor's cave-pad

winding thought's string out from the fisherman's reel

into the labyrinth of the spikily-ceiled tunnels

or tying thoughts string to a sinking stone

winding around a sore-thumb stuck out on the ledge

Adriatic life-line blue infinite turquoise

green shallows clear white flat sea bottom

rocks stare up from swooped by ivory

winged gulls if not terns whose pinion-tips

dip into the surface slicing small trails

in the mild undulation of watery (crossed out)

sea moss blue-black urchin world

& greener moss & brown yellow-trimmed

umber cliffs jagged up to the blinding white castle

timeless clash of red burnt maple leaf against

whittle down rocks of the sea, buoys, etc

white smooth of the castle blinding white

with the kelpy hanging residue & otherness junks

it's a sandwich they eat, notebook laid

carelessly on the balustrade edge over-looking

already written about stuffs above here, look!

read again to this point, don't give up

no end to the wind is in sight

and widely spead about it's invisibility

the sensing body somewhere robed in uncertain flesh

gently ripples broken on the edge

of consciousness whetted (wedded)

with the aqua pura, chiara, pale skies

on which the sea cloud bears the sun

turn and find behind Palazzo Hotel Adriatico

the bronze god his or her hand uplifted always

some sadhu in green patina but the blazing god

hands drawn in the white-heat drawn into his bosom

lost child lost mother there all blossoms

and a prism planted in the solar plexus

while in the parking lot a laughing father

plays at dumping the laughing son

into the trash bin while silent gulchs in whom

the trees bend waving and all about seems happy

flutter doves again, the armillary sphere,

Our Lady of Adrenal Metempsychosis

wind and water woven throughout