ODE TO EXPERIMENTAL

 

 

            --- Ode to Experimental ---

 

 The idea that art and music were akin to, concerned with the exploration of metaphoric "terras incognitas", places where star trekkers had gone not before. This is what comes to mind when I think of experimental music. That and how experimental became disparaged as inconclusive or too open to be substantial and how very wrong this is. For it is the gated mental community world of consumerism and conservatism alone that forces us into conformity with genre and empty concepts of quality and duality. What I'd wanted to do in poetry and music was to catch up with the actual world. Experimental is not academic. Experimental is not elitist. Experiments are radical and can be calm and reassuring as a gentle rain in the forest during summer or a cyclone disrupting space and time. Experimental music engages chaos and natural forces. Experimental music improvises and invents. Experimental music is clear and propositional. Experimental music involves one, two, three or more players, orchestras, species and states of matter. Experimental would rather you use your mind. It is not uniquely angry, sad, bored or nihilist but it denies nothing that can be summoned into the circle for the dance. Experimental music is without precedent quite often and appears to be alien and unruly but experimental music has a history and great traditions. Shamans were experimental musicians./ tone scientists/ paleoethnobotanists with a healing vengeance. Great lost indigenous traditions that are not lost really because they went from Benin to Haiti and mixed with Taino. Great herbalist traditions carried with Gypsies all over Europe and going under whatever name respectfully. Experimental includes free and folk and improvisational instrumentation and dance done by people wherever and whenever they congregate or isolate in temporary autonomous zones. Hugging entire forests with widely flung arms of imagination and science is experimental. The tape music of John Cage and Pauline Oliveros and the statistical modeling adopted by Xenakis to further dilate & explode serialism into pure sounds, the acousmatic works of Pierre Henry, Schaefer, orchestrating noise, blending energy fields of lysergic acoustic ecology, of deep listening strategies, the advent of field recording devices which allow almost anyone to make music concrete. Experimental music is you and your life. It belongs not to corporations, not to governments nor schools nor cliques nor elites. In the digital era or what is called the microsound aspect of granular synthesis, in glitch, one can view ever smaller fractal versions of the cosmos. Experimental space travel in sound. Thank you Sun Ra. Experimental means to experience. Thank you tape recorders and dictaphones: re-listen to experience and enter into the laminal planes of somatic and geological time. The fascination with ancient modes, archaic instruments, ethnic forgery, old skool, trap, Africa, polyrhythmatics, Indonesia (gamelaminality), microtones, aboriginal, experi-mental DIY. Experiment is dream time, dream incarnate.

 

Jeff Gburek 25/11/21 (revised 24/12/22)

 

 

 

 

COVID_19: Mass Formation or Mass Atrocity. My Personal Guide For Reading, Untangling the Tangled Web of these Pandemic Times

  Just an arrangement of some key extracts from this very crucial, neccessary & understandably lengthy article.  It's tricky reading because the critique of Desmet's Mass Formation concept, on the surface, compelling in and of itself and because there is something valid in some of Desmet's thesis, the authors echo that thesis, while coming eventually to show that the idea of people just being dumbass sheeple and victimizing themselves is a major distraction from understanding that the confusion and the ram-rodded pseudo-science was rigged to trigger the pharma industries' ushering in of a false justification for the vast array of vaccines, for big money. The article shows you who became billionarires in the pandemic crisis. Most tragically pointed out however is the fact that the reputation and credibility of Science itself underwent heavy bombardment and it will probably take a long time before we get any reset.  Otherwise, I make no further comment. Please read carefully and reflect. Peace, JG

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/11/investigative-reports/covid-19-mass-formation-or-mass-atrocity/

 "As regards the Covid-19 narrative, Damien Downing, President of the British Society of Environmental Medicine, observed that “Governments like epidemics just the same as they like war …. It’s a chance to impose their will on us and get us all scared so that we huddle together and do what we’re told” (Downing, 2009, cited in Kennedy Jr., 2021). Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav observes that, “For autocrats and others, Coronavirus is a chance to grab even more power” (2020). This suggests that there is some understanding in centers of elite global power that accepts as natural a permanent state of antagonism or, as Staub notes, “hostility”, between rulers and the ruled when manipulation, coercion, and force are needed to enact controversial policies. As recipients of government grants, medical ethicists in academia today have even suggested that a “morality pill” could be made compulsory or be administered secretly, perhaps in the water supply as a “moral enhancement” for those who resist “following public guidelines” (Crutchfield, 2020). Professor Crutchfield’s suggestion has not escaped the notice of critics who see his inspiration borrowed from the IG Farben experiments conducted during WWII on “human guinea pigs” (Bernstein 1945, p. 7). "

  "As vampiric practices of capitalism engorge themselves on humanity in its transition through inverted totalitarianism (Wolin, 2004, cf. Hedges, 2015) to more recognizable forms of totalitarianism involving Nazism (Hughes, 2022a) and eugenics (Kyrie & Broudy, 2022c; Loffredo & Webb, 2020b; Matters, 2021), given a yet more evil twist through sexual blackmail operations involving children (Webb, 2022), the conclusion that, “the essence of totalitarianism is not utilitarian or selfish in nature” (Desmet, 2022, p. 112) is impossible to maintain. Indeed, history teaches that the “greater good” is often an illusion, designed to mask the pursuit of ruling class interests."

METHUZELAH: FIRST ALBUM by Jeff Gburek & Pete Swinton. Reviewed by Rudy Carrera on Miscellany of Tasteful Music blog

 "Today is an auspicious day, as I’m proud to say that this is the 700th consecutive post this blog has produced since January 1, 2021. The release is one I held onto for such an occasion, as Jeff Gburek, heavily featured on my site for the astounding quality of his work, pairs with Pete Swinton, a multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Java, Indonesia. The music has a hazy, lo-fi psychedelic rock quality to it, and the pieces on this album feel alive. You get the sense that you’re not only listening to the album, but it’s crawling inside of you. It’s one of the few albums I’ve heard which made my arm hairs stand on end, and it literally gave me the chills hearing it. Organic music that makes itself at home in your veins as well as your brains. " -- Rudy Carrera Thank you!

Rudy's website with review and playlist:

https://musicyouneedtohear.com/methuzelah-jeff-gburek-pete-swinton-first-album/

 The album on my Bandcamp site where you can support the efforts of the independent creators: https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/methuzelah-first-album

 

Recent review by Pitta Wozzeck (Brazilian writer for Instrumental Verves) of Mangue Bangue, an album I made in 2022 with George Christian where I play my DIY electro-acoustic berimbau

 

 

 Recent review by Pitta Wozzeck (Brazilian writer for Instrumental Verves) of Mangue Bangue, an album I made in 2022 with George Christian  where I play my home-made DIY electro-acoustic berimbau.  This is a google translator translation, caveat lector

 

"George Christian & Jeff Gburek. 

   Here we already have a more visceral duet of these steel strings, more based on free improvisation, albeit in yet another resonant electronic immersion. George Christian forms a partnership with improviser and experimentalist Jeff Gburek, who plays with a berimbau immersed in electroacoustic distortions, being manipulated with a stick, bow and other approaches... And George Christian, in turn, plays with a prepared guitar —— altered both in timbre and in tuning —— and it explains very well this latency of sound aridity, the rusticity of its steel strings. The sounds and the entire sound plot between the improvisers, by the way, are inspirations from the impactful short film "Mangue-Bangue" (1971) by Neville d'Almeida, even though the duo does not intend to create an original soundtrack for the film, which is a landmark of Brazilian experimental cinema. Like the film, the soundtrack captures the extremes of human life: primitivism and expansion, the rustic and the avant-garde, the archaic and electronics. Although released more recently, this is another one of the records where George Christian and his musical partners create their sounds imbued with a dense reflective charge provided by the consequences of the pandemic and a troubled period of socio-political relations."

-- Pitta Wozzeck

listen to the jams we kicked out here: 

https://georgechristian.bandcamp.com/album/mangue-bangue-ep-gcsa-50

more verbal acrobatics in Brazilian Portuguese over here:

https://www.instrumentalverves.org/2022/12/os-sons-outsiders-do-guitarrista-baiano.html#more