Reifications//Minimal Animal//Reanimations

 just published a new album of experiences. field recordings of the melting, weavings of the voice in search of selves in leaves under the receding snow, reflections on the practice of phonography, meditations on reification, reanimation and poems by Ilaria Boffa who I invited to respond to these themes. listen here. there is an abundance of textual trace below

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/reifications-minimal-animal-reanimations

 Reifications/Minimal Animal/Reanimations

When I don my headphones and turn up the volume of my recorder I enter two new worlds, both parallel yet distinct from the one that seemed to exist alone unto itself only moments before. One new world in which the audibly distant appears closer because amplified while paradoxically the nearer sounds seem suddenly far away because magnified, suddenly gigantic, details alien, shuddering proximity. This new dimension so immediately a "copy" or transmission of the actual outside, life within the doppelganger. But yet another world comes into my awareness: the cavern of my listening body as it descends into itself or becomes stretched to the horizon of the audible, a body lost in sensation. Connection & isolation.

This album is a sound-scape, or a few sound-scapes rather, composed from the field recordings made in Wilson's Park around the Palmiarnia Poznanska during two days of thaw Feb 18, 19, the harbinger of a still somewhat dubious Spring 2021, struggling with self-actualization. In January the sudden cold spell bequeathed us a miniature ice age, that left ponds and paths frozen completely for the first time in a few years. This thaw represented an opportunity to capture the sounds of a transitional weather environment. While recording I contemplated the process of "keeping it real" versus "making it real" and the title "Reifications" was born. When I discovered I'd had some microphone failures on the first day, I went back into the field to retrace what was melting and discovered yet another world, the disappearance and awakening of life forms from their hibernation and the next title "Reanimations" came to mind. The reflections I had about being in the field as an immersed listener versus being a recordist are given voice in the second track "Minimal Animal" -- the full text is to found below.

When I began giving voice to my reflections about the process in the field the general outlines of the composition unfolded as a virtual brain-cast, a projection of words onto the auditory field of the listener, a glimpse of a thought process in motion mirrored in the listener's apprehension, just as the world of sound dawns in scattered assemblage. Then poems came to the written and re-voiced. Extending the horizon, I had imagined inviting my poet friend Ilaria Boffa to create some interventions here and like the light of a distant planet, she came through. Perhaps this all would have been finished a bit earlier had we not gone into another Covid-inspired lockdown. In any case, the ice is all gone by now, the trees do indeed bud, while it's still quite chilly, life and all that, seems to go on.

April 12, 2021
Jeff Gburek

 Dereification
by #Ilaria Boffa

Dereifying things and their
relation to agency.
From entities to systems.
Dereify and reify oneself
to co-exist and glow like
synchronous fireflies.
They disappeared from
the countryside, overbuilt
and polluted.

What is a land if not
a vow that comfort one’s void.
What is a woman if not
her voice, a myriad of echoes
resonance and lament.
Dereification of matter
and reification of the human.
Existing in the Real
without Reality.


Minimal Animal
by Jeff Gburek

When I went out yesterday "into the field," I didn't record and I didn't even take gear. But since I'd had that exchange with you, I found myself reflecting on the act of recording. On the one hand, I said, into my dictaphone, field recording is a media that, unlike all the others, leads you deeper into the moment, into the now, the present. But paradoxically, the recording is made, being made, and the replay is taking place in another moment where, in some sense, it doesn't belong. It is an abstraction. As a recordist, I treasure the moment of contemplation and immersion into listening. If the recordings turn out to be not so useful, at least you can feel you had the experience. But another more haunting thought came to mind: that we are constantly recording a place that no longer exists. The place is never in the recording. The law of nature keeps the place sacred and sovereign. We are taking away some trace of acoustic phenomenon but the place perhaps remains unaffected. when the place is violated by developers or destroyed by fires, the place is made different. if we had recorded a place just before an intervention or environmental upheaval, we perhaps preserved some layer of acoustic properties. but that only underlines the fact that the place we recorded doesn't exist and that it's very likely it can never be brought back to being what it once was. So what is the scope of this activity, in fact? Certainly one's actual experience is important and involved. I came to the conclusion that what matters most is to combine reflection upon the experience with the presentation of recording.  Just as Steve Simpson , the marine biologist who was trying to record fish realized that the boats were changing the life of the fish. He never recorded the boats because that anthropogenic noise is not what he's interested in capturing and presenting to us. It's the secret conversational life of fish that is interesting, not the rumble of engines which we know so well because we created the machines. Yet his observation that we need to narrate the absence of the space where the animal lives naturally is important. It's more or at least equally as important as the abstraction of the sounds made by hydrophones, the latter being held up as sparkling gems of pure audio but not giving us a full picture of marine realities.

Matter, mater, madre
by Ilaria Boffa

Matter, mater, madre
the origin of things
and their substance.
The manner in which
molecules interact with
one another, bind to one another
break inhibitions and conceive
anew while ignoring
other choices.

Things and their substance
our substance.
To the eye the task and the peril
of matching what appears with
what it’s familiar, dispensing with
experience. The loss of the univocal
and unambiguous certainty
of proximity.

Your substance that I borrow
from the stream
when it steers its current and
enlaces my forearm
abandoned to its will.
My substance detrital and lithified
at the estuary.
Matter carrying matter.

Things and their substance
The unambiguous certainty of proximity
Le cose e la loro sostanza
L’inequivocabile certezza della prossimità


Cover art by Jeff Gburek. Images of Charlie Chaplin and Josephine Baker lifted from Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics. "Economists need a metaphorical career change: from engineer to gardener".