EXTREMOPHILES : Jeff Gburek & John Palumbo. Full Length Album! Featuring Ilaria Boffa reading her poem "Il Valore di Ogni Cosa"

 Somewhere between jazzy drum & bass trance and efnodelic, which is a buzz word I just made up: suitable to the beat poetics informing our take on trance dub. and oh there is voice & poetry by our friend Ilaria Boffa who some of you may know.This is Extremophiles, the first full length album. 

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/extremophiles-merging-matter

 

 

 

 

"Merging Matter" is the follow-up album based on the Extremophiles EP called "First Batch". We could have called it First Batch Plus but decided not to carry one track over, so the first EP stands as a unique publication. Plus: we are really "merging matters" here. We've extended our sonic pallette: more acoustic, electroacoustic percussion, found sounds & field recordings. We include a very special re-working of a piece initally begun as a collaboration between Jeff Gburek and Italian poet Ilaria Boffa, "The Value of Everything" (heard in Italian, in her own voice) with added kicks, embellishments and mix by John Palumbo. Find the poem below in the About this Album section. Enjoy, comment, support, spread the word.
 

Cover image by Jeff Gburek. Script by John Palumbo.

Quando il vento soffia
impetuoso sui campi di grano
colonie di gruccioni volteggiano
dentro e fuori le chiome.
In alto e in basso
riorganizzano lo spazio aereo.
Tecnica cut-up
di traiettorie intermittenti.
Il valore di guardarne
il cambio di passo
su ogni foglia curvata.
Scorgere i buchi dei nidi.
Il valore di vivere la vita
piegata a metà.
Due testi lineari affiancati
e incapaci di
ripristinare il significato.
Il valore di stare
fermi, in attesa.
Il valore di ogni cosa.

--Ilaria Boffa

When the wind blows
wild on wheat fields
colonies of bee-eaters twirl
in and out the canopies.
Up and down they
rearrange air space.
A cut up technique
of intermittent trajectories.
The value of watching
their change of pace
on each leaf bent.
Catching sight of nest holes.
The value of living life
folded in half.
Two linear texts juxtaposed
and unequipped for
restoring meaning.
The value of standing
still, on hold.
The value of everything.
-- Ilaria Boffa  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poems written from Solstice 2022 and through January 2023 in the order of of their appearance in notebooks or facebook posts (on the road to some final form in the sand)

 

"I am pulled as rivers are

towards the end of something

something expanding like an Asia"

-- Hölderlin

 

 

--- itinerant inneries -- and "infinitesimal" -- so it happens anywhere (in any room at any time), 

always happening everywhere, you can't even keep up with that speeffle, it's the fastness of what's still faster than light blowing muons through us from whatever multiple big bangs might still be out there ready to happen haploid -- you, in the middle of some nowhere thousands of digitally scattered star-points in space in a debate with your cat about whose eyes are more diamond

wake up in the deaerths of our bowls

from meridian to meridian strung out clotheslines

of the gypsy camp on the outskirts in the minus 6 centrigrade

starched as in frozen -- a line of reverential poetry --

    a prose fractal on the recursion regarding space-time not having any gallilean 

(used to be "archimedean") point but to gather information as pursuant to all point potential in any possible universes expanding neuroplasticity

 

*

 

 

 

 

Fate-full Hour (Solstice, 2022)

 

"It is always difficult to come out from wherever we are

into this space that we share with one another."

-- Cecilia Vicuña

Just as simple as putting down the pen

or hanging a chandelier, I suppose.

Then there's always the thought: does she want me

to kiss her or does she just want me to want to

and does she really mind my being here

or really not being here at all.

Is being inside being at home?

When do we get home?

 

With #Olson you are always creating whole

worlds and societies in which you wind up cutting

your own hole in the ice. Or cutting out whole figures

in paper to paste into a book of collage works

where each page is continental drift itself.

Language as evagination.

 

What about being heard? While in the forest,

it's enough to listen. Tinny voice of somebody

on cell phone messaging service.

That sliver of voice in the distance, broken

Each of us in our own emergency.

 

Or let it be said now: the game is over.

Won or lost. The ball as it bounces,

into some other court entirely.

Why (utter) even these indulgences

but for some pain lingering

to be gently sent down stream.

If one can get to the edge,

close enough, that paper boat...

 

Then there are the cleaning people. At night

when you are out of the office. Removing the detritus,

the stuff we scratch off ourselves, the scraps

of our habitus, collected towards another heave.

Leaving us in our ghostly calm.

 

Or as in your poem, where happiness happens,

with the imperative need to undress.

If there were any bottom to this.

 

I triumph not over my incoherence. Or perhaps there is more

to incoherence than what I gather up, absorb...

Why don't I just let myself be? And among.

 

Looking at the hour, the round of the clock,

what is coming around the side of that fixture in our lives.

Have we darkness enough? Have we passed through

to the other side? We mount

the stairs again. We ascend.

 

Crossing the threshold, we turn to

look at one another. The skylight window

is open, fresh with rushing noise.

Simple as that.

 

 (21+/-22)/12/2022

-- who can describe the calculus of time?

 

 *

 

 

Dec. 24, 2022

 

"...the double-drum of dual insight,

is where the energy of time finds us..."

  -- Stephen Ellis

 

what branches were there supposed to be in the forrest

other than those that found you there

 

 the wings within your feet

as they fan the corridors

damp with petrichor, musk

that plenty which seems before value

scattered and nearly unknown

 

and then, skipping ahead, across gravel,

seated on the lichened stump...

   when i try to scribble ideas from dream-dark webs of glimpsed authenticity, I grope about working in multiple dimensions... text is really slow but even sound is slower than light, lighght gathers more slowly in sound files on-line -- light must be really slow on some other scale -- so what's the other ultravibrational frequency -- what medium can carry this dimensional amalgam? it's not language or maths -- what bees honey the dome to make it all happen? it's beneath out feet and higher than any sky -- opening to newborn on high as below --

 

*

 

There is a justice in this forest these words cannot touch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 2, 2023

 

sky above sky

in the cloud down layers

where the undead drift

letting it go, just like that

memory knot of stars

clustered in this nobody grip

by the dreaming for everything

high necked spruce branches

in the canopy clatter and giggle almost

mallards or maybe geese hoot

cutting cuneiform v and w

in tablet of nearly blue now

sun gone into other Sundays

around the globe in the future

mirrored Monday imagines the poem

and those late bloomer gunpowder blasts

enter like ghosts on the scene

unpredictable as memory itself

bygones becoming presages

events offering to unfold

enough to finish without

 

  an unseasonably warm woodsy walk

 

 

* 

Jan 3, 2023, later

the owing gets owned

when passing the buck

because there is no reality

superior to existence

each king rules on one throne, alone

as in chess, one square at a time

& only pawns can become queens (?)

if they cross the border

staying in the same iffy game

patiently arriving where we need to be

while mushroom caps push up

through the remnants of the universal veil

seemingly from anywhere in their

invisibly growing fuzzy filamental network

gridly in it's own warped ways

unforeseen, unannounced

harbinger of the future quantum field.

Is there any being right in being wrong? I wonder.

Correct me if I'm right

 

*

 

Jan 3, 2023

 

 UNKNOWN FISHES IMMORTAL HYPHAE

 

 looking under looking into looking over

 

*

 

Jan4/5, 2023

 

 

butterfly effect is written on air.

mycelial and beetle sigils inscribed

chemically willy-nilly on the cambium level

subcutaneous, as for trees

whereas painting applies to surfaces

and most early sophist-icated writing

systems gouge in clay or scratch on stone

later on skins in pigments, papyrus, scalps of wood

all across the eurasian transversal anyway

while in china there were scrolls

hmm... dried fabrics, dry wood... paper...

writing was born of black blood, purple, aluminum

molten lead, gold, whatever from the alembic spills

volcanically to the gravitational constant

slow life slower than slow life

gyring or conspiring to gyre

down as up

by the time there was a walter benjamin there was the ink from which she was born

 

*

 

 

Jan 6/7, 2023

 

after many aeons unspoken abiding still

fettered to cacophony of identity

access to whatever splattered excess of trance

to die of beckett or benjamin's cast

for any writer who will not meander

nothing will push the pen or tickle the heavy keys

coldly tethered to everyday reveries

within which the catches of the salmon revive

occasionally pawing them bearly upstream

spawning demeter's vaster daughters

pushing them in prom or pram

wedding them to walnuts and thyme

ever so forlorn in the keatsian clover agrovelin

abt some syllabary of the codex actuelle

to discover old knots of quippo

hanging from heaven up under amazon's armpits

throughout the canopy of mind

& be still the sap from the knotty pine

accelerando ed agglutinando

sowing circadian seeds, fragments

spores of the universal veil

 

*

 

Jan 8, 2023

 

 

Existence being daily

while nightly alone for some

poetry dateless awake into the sleep

on either side, draws death up

like a blanket that folk wisdom

wanted to cast away

with the brittle margin of seas clinging

and the pull of the tide

Cannot escape momentum

The entropic engine

Our life pushes up the invisible

Mountain born of the slide

 

*

 It either speaks to deity or nature about the shared nature (occult science of common sense) or it speaks to the shared creators of a language in process of creating itself but it never speaks while not trying to seduce one to believe in things inexplicable that support everything you want to call reality but cannot grasp in one take. It never speaks of one being alone. It creates a sense of wholeness or a sense of gentle fragmentation that upholds the various nets of existence. Speaking about it without becoming it never happens in anyway that makes you feel outside of the truth it unites you with or reminds you about never having left. In school they taught us merely the alphabet and solfeggio. We learn the rest by ourselves for ourselves. It is a gift.

 

*

  

just shy of physical value

the particle cloud

a portal

a castle

no singular path

for the thinker

to enter

and the dancer

still has to

dance around

until viewers

become the cloud

just shy

of physical value

 

*

poem in the form of a comment

 

how many listeners do you need until you get one real listener. same for the readers. if it amounts to how many previews you make before publishing, you are still only thinking algorithmically about rates of reflection and refraction that may have nothing at all to do with what is actually miraculous about all creation. even if it's all random (life, cosmos, existence) you got sucked inside. who can account for this to some degree merits consideration. wandering jewel of stars

 

*

 

 I want to be a poem. What do I have to do? 

Seek to be written by a poet. Just pretend you are a poem and go to a poetry reading. 

Mingle and stand apart. Dress like a flower. Play dead. Be very rational around drunken people. 

Wash in the blood of the lamb. Take the meds. Jump into a taxi and say I am a poem, just take me anywhere. Absorb everything. Express everything. Ask all the right questions at the wrong time. 

Be incorrigible, truthful, sincere. But first of all, tend to be misunderstood. 

With a smile. Poker-faced. Sad and non-chalante about it all. 

As if you didn' really want to really be a poem.

 

 

 

 

 

Ariadne's Thread: Karolina Ossowska (violin) & Jeff Gburek (synthesizer, soft orchestration)

 

Acrylic, Oil, Pencil by Jeff Gburek

 

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/ariadnes-thread

 

 George Cristian Vilela Pereira writes:   Here's a journey to the center of your mind... but in a cosmic archeology of sounds that comes from very engaging musicians. One of the best meeting between violin and synthesizers you may find...! Favorite track: cetacean audiology.

 Rudy Carrera (Miscelanny of Tasteful Music) writes:  The album has four compositions which are about as gentle and pleasing as anything I’ve heard in the past few years. It’s farther out than, say, Kosmische Musik, yet elegantly restrained. This is music for taking an inner journey and finding what terrain lies inside of yourself. Favorite track: beacons of the blood (cri du sang)

 

     This is our Ariadne's Thread. Taken as metaphor for a trace, a trail, a mnemonic trick, a memory palace. I set out to let the sound of the violin play the role of the thread in the matrix (maze, the labyrinth of the synthesizer). I take the lead in following. I follow the lead by listening. The relation is fluid, morphean. You will have your own take on it all. 

     Enjoy the soulful playing of Karolina Ossowska on violin.
 

     Seeing the thread metaphorically or symbolically, archetypally, I've articulated through the titles various imaginary realms of mapping.
     

    ουρανογραφια: sky maps, heaven-ward and or celestial cartography -- connecting drifting photonic clusters of autonomous elementals in relation to one another in the course of one's life, finding one's self -- a miracle thread from ariadne -- the mother of the mother of god -- coil'd in the genome-- a miracle thread from ariadnean arachne spider-lady in the labyrinth -- a echolocating land mammal re-writing it's destiny by evolving into the oceans and sounding submarinely -- our themes... 

      you may develop or evolve your own while listenin...

-- Jeff Gburek

     P.S.  Further commentary by George Christian Vilela Pereiera arrives: 

"Ariadne's Thread", new album by Jeff Gburek and Karolina Ossowska, is a brilliant demonstration of fulfilled unity between the sounds of Gburek's modular synthesizer and Ossowska's violin. To say that it's "cosmic" might be redundant. I'd say that the drones created by the synth work are of real highly imaginative sensibility towards the textural and tone qualities that’s increasingly complex on spectral exploration (as he says, a “maze”). The “thread” of the violin increases the sense of a challenging existence, with a melancholy that’s prevalent in every piece, as much as a melodic sensibility that blends Eastern and Western worlds. That’s not a “new-agey” and “fluffy” meditative music, though. “Ariadne’s Thread” is an orphic meditation made in a world that at a stake. Though it’s not a long album (in fact, it feels more like an EP) and not a very much challenging listening, it’s not weak music at all. As the poetic titles infers, it’s a trance-inducing listening, but with real soulful qualities, speaking lots for the mind, the heart, and the soul. A demonstration of strength."

 

 

Whose Gonna Survive All of Dis? (set of 3 poems, drawings, images of resonance, October 2022)

  "nature abhors any object, is what I mean
break it down for me. not so simple.
erosion is our star, orbitans, lightening bounce from jupiter
the shoreline of my mental systems shape-shifting
depends on the defiance of boundaries death compels..."   more below in the flow

 

https://ramblerecords.bandcamp.com/album/corduroy-cascade

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/pharoahs-tarot

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/elektro-seoul

 

MAYBE THE TREES?

who created the star broad enough to metabolize your oblivion?

search heaven for what star systems inform my body's electricity
and you will find several several specific binary tripolar eccentricities
convulvulus of wild fowl chases you across galaxies only to sleep in the guardian womb
photosynthetic caverns of leaves & the underground atelier
beavers, nutria, vivaporous tree-eater mammals
many a-thing eats down the chain of lives

nature abhors any object, is what I mean
break it down for me. not so simple.
erosion is our star, orbitans, lightening bounce from jupiter
the shoreline of my mental systems shape-shifting
depends on the defiance of boundaries death compels
bringing things down to the minimal we others absorb
and I want to wail the reedy blues of the orbatids unsung
secret killer of grasses and manufacturer of death soils

which are the same as resurrection soils

ceaseless consumation and depositry

but after a certain intellectual treeline, preconception dissolves
prosecco goes flat, the net goes down in the middle of the film
it's like meeting johnny depp too late in life for it to matter
yes, even jolie or jaylo! even shakira! maybe beyonce?
news comes in deflagration of war, raises the price 900 x
all that glitters comes up in body bags and nagual
shadows of meaning, blood-hounds rambling,
that box of coupons, lottery tickets and collage cuttings,
those 5 other guitars you never play, 250 bottles of nail polish,
all goes becky noddy as ballast to the overburdened seas
there's no time to play freebird, everybody's headed for the door
without coats until in the absolute outside kelvin degrees
demand the whole collapse of vital stars scatter brinkmanship
into skid-marks, skid-rows, scamper van grunge,
a survival sign in neon flashes with the S gone dark
URVIVAL

  URVIVAL

URVIVAL

  URVIVAL 

o'er which forms the Ozymandian ridge of sand

shifting in the off-grey bulks of post-nuptial nautical twilight
blindly blinking...

Despite knowing coffee is bad for me, 

a cuppa'd be fine just now
rather than the corroded domes & megaphones of disaster

shuddering this alternate universe dream in the bell-crack of the beast
if only we had enough time the holy ghosts' might

might mightily save us
or maybe, given enough time, maybe the trees

spores, doors, reedy skirts be hangin'
near the spruce
travelin the calves

 

----

 

 

music is freedom itself as dance living dying 

into mycomass always flowing

great hydras of terraforming cryptobiotic soil 

on the birthday of Arthur Rimbaud

mingling undulations siphoning idiosyncracy crapshoots

mon ultra somnolent itinerant cactus

my music never over

here but lion's mane mycelial

sporadic mutant blossom

ready now to dusk

as visions come to jacob boehme

far too early bohemian

fathoms of mothers gather their moss

build the braintree's leaves

prepared pinnacle

pineal acorn

nut squat

stored by squirrels

doffs its cap --

it's almost Spring

inside the Ice

 

---

 

 knowing what eyes want, I want art (meaning whatever I do) -- knowing what ears know-- to remind me that I should be honest, faithful, rebellious, traditional, drunken (oh, but why?) and yet sober (but what for?). That's all. I want art to remind me of what I really want and that which gets me up to do. This and that. Anything. To revert, pervert, return, advance, get sucked backwards into forwards, to be free to be freedom's arrival point, free from view, in the underground rail-roads of water, sluices, followers of elderly root networks, sending via mycofilial tendrils and slime moulds the woodpecker's cry to send water up to the bud's of next year's the new leaves the new year's sunbeams, buried in the acorn's ruin