Queen Mab: Machine Mantra in Homage to the Working Class and Gordan Mumma

Queen Mab is a machine-based mantra in homage to the working class tradition and Gordon Mumma. I'd been reading Shelley and Douglas Kahn's Earth Sound, Earth Signal when the materials coalesced. These are very strong waves in low frequency spectrum and you will have a better experience with stand alone speakers, adjusting to your preferred volume level. 

 Listen to the track here

https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/queen-mab-for-gordon-mumma

"He was animated to greater zeal by compassion for his fellow-creatures. His sympathy was excited by the misery with which the world is bursting. He witnessed the sufferings of the poor, and was aware of the evils of ignorance. He desired to induce every rich man to despoil himself of superfluity, and to create a brotherhood of property and service, and was ready to be the first to lay down the advantages of his birth. He was of too uncompromising a disposition to join any party. He did not in his youth look forward to gradual improvement: nay, in those days of intolerance, now almost forgotten, it seemed as easy to look forward to the sort of millennium of freedom and brotherhood, which he thought the proper state of mankind, as to the present reign of moderation and improvement. Ill health made him believe that his race would soon be run; that a year or two was all he had of life. He desired that these years should be useful and illustrious. He saw, in a fervent call on his fellow-creatures to share alike the blessings of the creation, to love and serve each other, the noblest work that life and time permitted him. In this spirit he composed Queen Mab."
 -- P.B. Shelley

 "Sound” allowed Mumma mobility between literature, theater, and music, and his DIY abilities opened new possibilities in compositional practice and live electronic music. He could modify anything and construct “instruments that had no cultural precedence.” He recalls, “I had no—this is important—no cultural precedence imposing upon me to make sounds or music or whatever.” In the late-1950s, there were not very many musical works to emulate, even if he had wished to do so. “I had no repertory except my own,” he says. This no doubt freed him to compose music from among the sounds of his daily life that, in the early 1960s, happened to be the laboratory sounds of earthquakes and underground nuclear explosions he encountered at his day job.
-- Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound, Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts

Conspiracy Therapists. In the Place of a Vain Search for an Image of the Age. New album release on Mahorka Records and a review

conspiracy spider (recently rediscovered older version of the album art)

First of all, have a listen.  

https://mahorka.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-place-of-a-vain-search-for-an-image-of-the-age

 My Introduction

The title for the album links back to that year (or years) when many iconic figures of music and art seemed to be dying one day after another. Twilight of the idols, playing on repeat. For many, the frame of the world was lost while for others it was merely shifting. Perhaps I felt this was only a creative energy recycling moment. I didn't take the losses personally, in a familial sense. But that a generation was passing into memory and maybe no longer a guiding light for us until we find the lantern has been given into our own hands. Better look around. In my attempt not to drop it and even without knowing what way there was to be shown, I staggered forward with the title. 
Filippo accepted the title for the track which later became the title for the the album. 

"In the Place of a Vain Search for an Image of the Age"

is first of all about continuity for me. Yet it's an album concerned with transitions. 

Shortly after the first track was recorded, my laptop, and therefore my processing environment -- which gave the unique character to the  "The Watermark", "Visitations" -- became unusable. After recording "I am sitting in a room, performing the society of the spectacle," we also lost our flat in Wilda quarter of Poznan, which had served as my home studio. I attempted relocation to Ireland, which failed. My effort to create a new rap-style came forward in notes I made while walking in the mornings those last days in Wilda, an attempt to scry the detritus of the streets, pure description, commentary on the darkness and uncertainty. 
The allusion to Alvin Lucier's process composition and Guy Debord manifested for me other signs of a shift in the image of the illusory transcendentalism of the arts themselves (I speak mainly for myself, for Conspiracy Therapists is a duet, but we are both free-thinkers and live and change our minds when thinking upgrades). 

While some of us may disappear into a shimmery blur or anonymous murmur of room resonance in a gallery or art space in the white cube world of colonialist squatters, the majority of the people remain fixed in a world that the ecopaths "create"

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath

Most of us are left trying to clean up, cope:  resisting falling socially to pieces, deforested, drifting into the "hothouse earth" position due to the unchecked carbon emissions and all the while the stubbornness of gamester politicians and pundits and jet-setters, goes on bringing species depletion, virus-jumps, an all too human level of objective misery for people who were not born into the richest percentile of the the population. 

"I am sitting in room performing the society of the spectacle" 

is a song about lockdown into the social media, the inability to disappear or escape, the stubborness of the literal world and Filippo's field recording of a man crying "solo voglio dormire" seems to attest to this strange existential insomnia. 

The final piece "In the Most Unlikely of Places" includes field recordings and acousmatic material from Wilda, Poznan my time in Ireland, some travels in Bulgaria, grappling with a new transitional living environment in one of the noisiest places I've ever lived (thankfully behind us now). Altogether this album spans 3 or maybe more years of work and the meeting of my world and Filippo Panichi's in a world between worlds that unfolds through the visceral movement of sounds. 

Many thanks to Ivo Petrov and Mahorka for helping us transmit the signals to you the listeners.

Don't hesitate to check out the other artists on this wild & wise label

http://mahorka.org/release/246 

And Finally

Here's a review by Disquiet Junto's Marc Weidenbaum

link below

https://disquiet.com/2020/06/28/current-listens-filmic-exploration-hyperspeed-pummel/?fbclid=IwAR1kktsZIVp0N4N8VRc6JQtSBfHKAfYYnxyCdDbchGgvDDjtbNA3Cxb8boc 

as if you were already in harmony with nature

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/as-if-you-were-already-in-harmony-with-nature

I didn't really know you very well, maybe not at all but that doesn't mean I don't care. It's beginning to look doomy all over this many-textured globe, extracted & ailing. Mustard gaseous skies & hourly hail. Soon none of this will exist or will become unrecognizable. Eyes will look out but mind will go blank. Who are we? What have we done? Even if you could come back you wouldn't know where to go to begin your new journey.

That blown over stand of hills, ridges gone, ripple of sand, shaking hands. I wander like a wobbly clock in an irregular circle in the landscape of identity. Buildings falling, rising, ponds filled, trees felled, concrete poured, concrete broken. Look at the lone wild weed proudly vertical shooting through the crack in the side-walk. You again? Here? Why?

I'd like to revert to the old century and finish the poem I was writing in the California redwoods. I'd like them to have all their lands back and let the leaves close the curtains on my tracks. I'd take one step back and say, hello, is anybody at home?

All my life I've been traveling backward in time. The numbers add up, true. There's accumulation, yes, from a certain point. But even beyond that there is no beginning.

What on earth are you talking about?

The trees way of walking was to slowly send out roots and branches.

There was a secret being shared with everyone who would keep the secret.

Sacred. Cyclorama.

Eventually our marriage became a caravan. It took ages to grow the wheels which at first made so much noise the deer fled. Then they got used to it. Mere movement meant them no harm. In the eyes of the fawn I saw my own selfless self. Eating flowers.

Why do you want to be so unconcealed? So unconcealing?

In the city down there somewhere already one heard murmurs, rumors, hisses, muffled voices, slamming doors, sirens, trains, trucks, tirades. Chains of reasons people made.

I check the box but I never read the user's agreement. I've gotten used to triple, quadruple-takes.
And I still don't know what I am or what I am seeing. Only that I see.

(TBC)

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/as-if-you-were-already-in-harmony-with-nature

This new album was recorded spontaneously a few days ago and in part responds to the passing of Marc Orleans, a guitarist I barely knew.  I play prepared acoustic guitar. There is a juxtaposition between the inside of the music and the environmental sounds and this is why you should listen in a quiet environment. There are some deliberately harsh sounds that function as signs of the situation of human crisis with and within the natural world, as the title suggests. Thank you for your support.