We
happily announce the official release of Trans-Beskid Radio Volume II by the Bulgarian netlabel Mahorka.
"Many of the old signifiers have
disappeared and neo-zombie signs become newly coined to describe the old
or completely novel zombie-signifiers which proclaim meanings to exist
which have not been acknowledged, accepted, recognized. I read in my own
transformations here a future in which I am entangled and evolving with
thoughtful moves. I paint in radiographical terms. I set out in my
listening and remain contemplative, receptive, peering around the edges
of the noise."
-- from the liner notes, Jeff Gburek, 2021
Previews with voice-over: https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/trans-beskid-vol-ii-previews
Previews with video by Filippo Panichi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=396VcIDjqf4&ab_channel=JeffGburek
Trans Beskid Radio Volume II (Natural Complexity of Zombie
Signifiers)
Live Set @ Paradigms Hub
Floating Cloud House, Wisła, Malinka
August 2020
1) Unmasked at Last (Light We Can't See)
2) Indian Ocean Aerials
3) Papal Boomerang Drone Attack
4) Every Sound a Singular Beacon
5) Anadadanta/Nadadanta
6) Biomechanical Sonority
7) Interactive Integrity
8) Natural Complexity of Zombie Signifiers
9) Hunting for Deeper Anamnesis
10) Not Happening Is Still Happening
11) Maritime Artefacts in Mountain Morain
"New technology consumes the forms of the past, and in
doing so, transforms them. The content of a medium is always another
medium." -- Marshall Macluhan
"It occurs to me that an eddy, a whirlpool effect is in
the movement of the blue light energy round the globe of this planet earth.
This is completely separate from earthling roots. Artificial Intelligence is
driving and amplifying the speed of this whirling made up of fragments of
incomplete storying's, facts, fiction, surmise, guessing, falsifying, and distortions
too quick to catch, subliminal imagining, violent images,
catastrophics..."
-- Carlyle Reedy, 12/12/2020 (via Facebook)
While radio signaling may not be entirely separate from our
earthling roots, the radio signaling sphere has certainly expanded in range and
density. Like a loosely thatched roof or cyber-crown on top of the ionosphere,
the 5G bubble expands. My radio and my own ears can receive now from further
realms of accidental cooperation an unheard of propagation of waves and a new
complex of commingling mass inter-references. Shortwave and medium wave radio
captures recorded and mixed live in the Beskidy Mountains are the source and
subject of my work here in this release on Mahorka. (Bulgaria) and continues
the momentum kicked of by Antenna Non Grata label in Poland. With my radio
captures I express the wish to re-inscribe my experience on the skies and an
desire to transmit my own reception amid the virtual and real celestial beings
merging with the creative forces of the universe. And to share and invite you
to do the same.
Radio was one of the ways I was getting to know the place
where I was confined during the summer of plague year 2020, on the border
between Poland & the Czech Republic. Culturally connection to humanity
reduced to invisible waves. Naturally an admixture with foreign yet unalienable
earthly experience was the continual communion. Stream, trees, berry bushes,
birds, bees, wasps, snakes, deer, rain, fog, sun, moon. Humans off in
distances, cutting, motors, megaphones of ceremony, sports? Mysteries of
Lockdown.
"The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an
expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere, " writes
naturalist Barry Lopez. "The determination to know a particular place, in
my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind,
is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense
that they themselves are
becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that
place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a
sense that one is necessary in the world." When I would slip between two trees or ford the stream and brings
my microphones through the thickets shyly, I often wondered who would take note
of my passage. An owl's feather on the hill felt less like random molting and
more a thoughtful gift. I did not feel necessary. Yet I felt somehow
integrated. In stillness belongingness would follow in the space between
abandoning too many thoughts and dwelling on the margins of the senses, alert
& calm.
The forest was filled with critters, anomalies, novelties
and micro-process. Listening to the winds and then listening to the radio waves
decode in the crucibles of the high mountain cabin, I felt a connection with a
meta-language of polyvalent systems and the flux of cosmogonic coincidence
inside my own fleeting construct of identity. Trees seemed electrically
charged, the Perseid meteorites skimming overhead. We seemed part of an
unfolding of both broad-scaled and miniscule gestures. When meteorites could be
heard influencing the bounce of the radio signals I found myself thinking again
of Umberto Eco, his semiotics "the ability to identify messages where it
is supposed there are only gestures and read signs where there are only
objects".
While I was in the field I received notification of a
commission for Radioprhrenia Glasgow and I began to imagined how some of these
radio recordings might be used, happy that I would get another chance to
transmit via radio what radio transmits to me.
"Culture is brimming with relics in the form of zombie
signifiers, " wrote Zygmunt Baumann in his "Sketches in the Theory of
Culture". Since the old meanings
of cultural signs are constantly
shifting, there is an emptying of significance. If the Zen concept of the
half-empty/half-full glass can be invoked here, I would say that whatever we
are saying these days, one half is the old school sense, somewhat obsolete,
while the other half is filled with the codifications of the new generations,
ahead of us, somewhat unrealized and potential. With the realm of the radio,
there is a ghost half always half empty and a ghost half always half full. Many
of the old signifiers have disappeared and neo-zombie signs become newly coined
to describe the old or completely novel zombie-signifiers which proclaim
meanings to exist which have not been acknowledged, accepted, recognized. I
read in my own transformations here a future in which I am entangled and
evolving with thoughtful moves. I paint in radiographical terms.
I do not speak only about the meaning
of radio as a cultural manifestation or as mass media, as propaganda, spreader of
cliches. Whereas we attach coded electronic pulses to the radio waves in an
effort to communicate between ourselves and government enacts control thereby, I
have always been as equally concerned with how radio waves, as cosmic forces per se,
communicate themselves through us. I set out in my listening and remain
contemplative, receptive, peering around the edges of the noise.
