transparent abelard

"the watermark" continues...

2011-11-07T21:11:00.002+01:00

http://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/the-watermark-8-with-chester

Codex Seraphinianus

2011-11-06T00:07:00.004+01:00

http://www.archive.org/details/Codex-Seraphinianus

split album with elizabeth Veldon on black circle records

2011-11-05T15:39:00.007+01:00

http://blackcirclerecords.bandcamp.com/album/polish-america-amnesia

elizabeth's approach via sampling from polish and american films stretched or otherwise transformed into sheeny vectors of not exactly drone but some kind of "whatever it is" she does do so well. my first track takes the aural essay approach via sampling lou reed, polish hip-hop, techno, choral vanguradism and my second liberally mistreating penderecki's monumental "paradise lost" (a work that i might characterize as one of the greatest accidental noise compositions ever to assault our sense and sensibility), all in order to think about what it is people are trying to feel towards through their needs for constant entertainment. my final piece, "witkacy's impotence clock" is perhaps more of an homage than a critique of the suicided writer/painter/photographer/drug experimentalist, composed of ticks and tocks, house-hold devices, small percussion elements close-miked and digitally recast into russolian cacophonic inherence. and it's all free for download.

On La Monte Young's Second Dream of the High-Tension Stepdown Transformer

2011-11-05T11:39:00.002+01:00

!(((formatting here won't permit the proper line length)))))!

long lines beaming lofty into the dark along longer lines leaning hailward into the rose of last nights beginning

long rows of the traum-tone extending beyond what seeing as i can't describe orders back oblivion and goes on to seem so or only so

runs on before me as some kind of road going onward and nowhere resolving the brim of the convexity

rays of running light or the running lights of rays riding on the ruins of aural memory

and again long lines dipping into luminescent trails or rails run off from trains the heaving of lungs bewail

lines shining starless or stars themselves unseen in the self-origin of their setting nimbus tripped into evaporation

glistening in the listening to themselves pining oracles of their over-arching senility they travel younger than time and still

as monotony slivered with scintilatiing splinters of an abiding cacophony remain emotional as in moving and unmoving

texas or new mexico where lingering rickety leans of fences hem the yellow green munch and sun-pickled sanddollars of cattle manure

there is a theory in all this that has nothing to prove outside of its practice where theory itself is the mode of seeing waves and everything just begins again spuffling

to swell over the sucking ears that sleep and vibe their eternal tinnitus jesting the brain with inconsolable mares

shooting fluted runnels or rills of air resembling or reassembling the imaginary of wires weighted with pulsar parameters

boundary nexus of multilinear gravitational pulls permitting the sparagmos of inertia and the scandalous capers of two-bit stars

spittle drip off the stem spout tensile ingnotum clasping the floor of feral algae fed upon by whales moaning lonely songs

over the mountain hump of the last expected galaxy and further without backward glance coming from behind everything nevertheless and merging into infinite slittamenti

these are the smiles of gasping through the stem to stern spiral of the lines of longing that never ends

these are the mangers of the daughter of man already eaten by the kingless queen unrealming the night's hand on day

with my brittle anthology of unhinged syllables and leaky teapot i go sit on the roof to hear you fall a thousand deaths into my small life

and i paint your portrait with wine-stained fingers on the back of my love whom i place between two mirrors

and sleep when we decide we can rise again tomorrow to decipher what it means

salva adesso salve adesso salvete line line line

(to be continued)

March 4, 2011, Poznań

The rendering of the composition I have been listening to in flac received through the kind agency of Michal Ossowksi is entitled "90 XII 9 c. 9:35 — 10:52 PM NYC The Melodic Version (1984) of The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From The Four Dreams of China (1962)" which the Wikepedia unreliably but perhaps accurately lists as having been published by Grammavision in 1991 but I have no memory of hearing it then. When I first heard La Monte Young's works in the 80's his reputation had preceded him and any audition; and the bi-polarity between my youthful Marxism and my otherwise and beyond being transcendental-immanantist poetic cravings created a dissociation whereby I could only regard him as a crank guru to be admired at a distance. Whether or not I have any right to even describe this situation is perhaps as meaningless to the reader as it is to me. And yet it doesn't go without saying at all, if you have been paying attention up to this point. I do admire the work and also preferably at a distance, with a big bowl of gaping stars falling on my eyelids. I first had an occasion to play a regrettably foreshortened version of this piece in Warsaw in 2008 in a quartet comprised of myself, Eddie Prevost, Tetuzi Akiyama and Phil Durrant. It was a decent enough beginning. Playing a composer's work (or trying to do so) changes one's attitude rather permanently; there is no longer a feeling that any recorded version is acceptable if it is a great piece of music; you must play it again, experience it as coming though your own body; the music exists as a quality of air; it seems essential to your being and welfare; you have an unshakable desire to take a deep breath and begin again; in short, it is love and fucking and there is no substitute for it whatsoever; you find a way to do it or you die trying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfZzz58VUaw

"i'm graphic like that"-- score and binary

2011-11-05T11:36:00.001+01:00

9RpI^[0(V^c&^%cp8&Vco76%^[9uvCIytTYB{NYBP*V&^%f8voutCFVLbgvfkHytfCKUYVLubyvMCGFVMBHJLUYVTCRXECFvgbVCsweRtyuioiUYTRSjhGVB

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november 9, 2010, poznań, jg

'Tender in the night and the washing machine alone with you and a few of those laughing cigars whereby satyrically wrapped the ploral garment of soul

2011-11-05T11:32:00.003+01:00

'Tender in the night and the washing machine alone with you and a few of those laughing cigars whereby satyrically wrapped the ploral garment of souls may thread forth barely',

for prepared guitar, mini-theremin, live electronics.

First realization October 25, 2010 in Poznań, Poland.

Dedicated to Stephen Ellis, Karolina Ossowska, Hubert Napiorski and YOU.

http://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/jeff-gburek-tender-in-the-night-and-the-washing-machine-october-25-2010

leap emptiness (boundary), the perfect is, form set { imaginary } the 15 lateral devices & every drone between point a and b

2011-11-05T11:29:00.001+01:00

"this book is not for reading. this book is for discovering. what is in this book to discover? This above all, but first of all, that it is only a book..."--Edward Stachura

"okay now, let's get round" -- a voice in the distance

that certain kind of drift under control tones ending specified functions by a cloyed resultant inefficiency to attend a focal nexus

"stemming through horizons"

from the rain falls badly magnetic harps another mouth all the grand parents or grand-children's teeth before the weapon announced

youth ego roamage opacity regret tender in the cuticle for heaven downs the perfect clip painstakes the agora cuts up further minimalism cries in the unofficial version cries in the official unsure of either sincerity beyond was of the crash-landing immaculate

what great tabs you have revealed the nebulous know alone suited in themselves of inner woven over suited in such selves that negligee of broken links patching as a thoroughness of hybridity melting into dozens

from these three muscles the derivation of literature sempiternally and divide the cluster behind the ear's mirror there gently tongue what's left of it after all rightness falters three sacs or more of air grown plush

you couldn't have put the sky in a better place had you tried and wore even nevertheless out the welcome of impact sybylls rebracketed and the erosions swirling all pop and no soda in just anybody's stomach

_----_ OXYGEM __---_----

in yesterday's pizza are found the projections of ever more untoward boxes no condtion original appends to

such a record the needle broke off in the groove and that machine of memory no longer figured just as clearly our kids no coulda suppressed that vowel particular to shabby saturdays and thus this thusly the acetone flower was classed out of

you couldn't weep on the eighth without tears freeze open your eyes to the ninth summons stepdown drawer and conscience itself a kind of mastication seemingly all tagged a dog number one

you wouldn't golf with a ball so bound in patterns, why patterns, why poland, why the gulf of my arms the black gold liquid the deafened bird sunken

go on to brugges and cylindrical empire weareth out cedar and wolves dank brise offen the nacre by repetitions feel empty grace embrace the vessel of your calculations drive forthe the thicke new cloud

(if the man want's it to be "enterprise" what can we do about it?")

for each gape of the gyre the vines & pedigree tra_slucent limn their iffy wedges and air is it not for them sexual partitioning the shared hydropshere by gum oaken winch or untether

disnormal and aprized music was not going into germany that year any better than privately issued circulars of breathy achievement gave the plato of corpuscles to drink in anyone's cafe

zero by remainder shall be known that votive or grain elder mellowing so and for only this step that she came she comes through would be and having so brisques the smile and ups the rumple in any line

manfred was a lousy sort of poster, a pastie, a postie

via immobile

those who in secretion have cured thy heart and drape about towns their own unshod horse withit taking they mount for themsouls wish not ash upon them or jess up other winchesters for their rut deeply coined gone paleo to whatever next sudden miscredenza

what you are free to say when you know that no-one is listening. what you could say if you were not being bullied to say something they mean but which they are too cowardly to say themselves, inwits. awareness a kind of nearness natheless gnomeliness the train whistle far down the line suddenly encompasses and blows open.

a sensible air charged with light all the dripnight long

august 8,9, 10

with friendly fractures "in between" that make it what it is and all the difference

that roundness, is around

the girl on the bike i have always dreamed of being

2011-11-05T11:22:00.005+01:00

all the permeable surrounds of the minimum pressure point dissolve

brisque

applied

the preferable leggings

thigh deep in a pond of leaves or letters

we don't know why

embryonic sunstroke

inside the fish

the girl on a bike i have often dreamed being

whatever unshould'r'd butterfly

everywhere and nowhere

specified, pedal tones

figure deep in the most fading lines of any drawing

...this face left

the right of that

alive in the light one sees over a wall

or better yet through

the wall's aliveness

august 8, 2010

poznan (virtually)

scraps of paper typed up in no particular order until now

2011-11-05T10:58:00.002+01:00

every people (person) is another person (people's) fantasy.
and there are some things you just can't fake
until you try (they'd've been otherwise, real enough, completely normal
without you, but there you are
in the silent stampede of eyes, eye-ocean-liners
stretching out a mile-long ghost or gist
under too many palpabrating horn-rims and arched frappeau
another mongolian throat metal populist front
a city of pretty kitties turning cart-wheels
they seem to say look and don't look.
at the tree of the unbelieving, stop, consider awhile
their positions, bizarrely arching, tangled
bursting forth from the earth and sun
spangle in their leaves a broad while searching, linger
and go on: fable cables from mythology
"make it to my office."
what's this i hear?
'bout you organizing a union?"
don't know what you mean boss.
punks just shootin' the shit
like it ain't no-body's bizness.
jimson, and aleph, telegraph erasmus,
dinner's at eight. good to hear the juice is on the vine.
here's a buck, get your head blocked.
i gotta round hole to screw you into. [Picks up the skull and dagger phone,
hears a dull buzz, downs the reciever, grim, catatonic.]
Troops had entered already this Atlantis, the shock flocks of seahorse
died and dyed the Caspian black evacuating, veins of blended black blood
woven towards Torun. Mushrooms, pinpricks
in voodoo beauty's cushion, where the head of the Hetman
falls back into his bed of flames.
I was never attracted to such sudden hot-button expulsion schemes up until that moment. double-brained boss last week spoiled bread sandwich caper, dynamite, lightening cracks an oak, bat wit twitters
lift the stone off his throat please, that way EVERYBODY
get's to sing [The classroom erupts into cheers, all will be able to scream, at once!]
The Library Heart freshened scalpel
DEVICE ON SURGE
there is no being more enlightened than on the moment of goodly death
the most beautiful woman in the room resembles this situation
fingers fathom down your feathered clouds
and into your bed-ridden details of elder fog
how small the smack strangely small creature is into everything so to say
go down on the infinite (he of the water-logged sails)
he who went home, too...
for the fragile infinite is woven into every thing we do
but I have run out of fragments for your dream

the aerth by a green hay-glow
liest engardened
find her roots
inside you now

december 2009-- december 2010, today, written mostly in
pozńan (mostly, but i'm not entirely sure...

The Tale of Fake Lake and the Man-made Clouds

2011-11-05T01:48:00.002+01:00

The Tale of Fake Lake and the Man-Made Clouds

for Lee Foust

"One set of cut marks does not make a complete case for cannibalism," said Francesco d'Errico, of the Institute of Prehistory in Bordeaux. It was also possible that the jawbone had been found by humans and its teeth used to make a necklace, he said."

Yes, I think I too have been guilty of thinking what will become of my so-called remains and those of the others maybe the beloved whose skull I find half-buried, recognizable only by the crooked teeth, in a strange vision of departures dreams made for me, in the open territories bounded by the city, the urban-urgency keeping dreams incomplete. How the box turned inside out shares edges with the other walls of the box whose precipitous verges I climb and nature's cardboard canopy which you cannot find here, how it...I don't know. It's as if this man I am wanted either to write a sentence or sound a silence long enough that he could walk around in. While at every period he falls outside. The roars are phantasmal yet no less disturbing thereby and therefore all the more maddening. How to stop the creation again is not an option. Pigeons. Clicker lighting the stove. A faded applique cherubim on the pillbox and unlit candle its wick clean, white, straight peaking out of a small copper cup next to the stack of blank note-blocs on which there should have been written in spidery hand the angels gnarled in cataracts and fossilized rills---I could have been reading someone else's mail, maybe you are reading this too, a voyeur and a catalyst, in someone else's mail (it certainly would be more exciting than entering even the most malkevitch of minds, another persons little life so much larger than your eyes) all of which is uninclined to comment back, its head's spiked with fish-fins waving and fanning aside the resistant masses into the disappearing depths, the depths of do and the depths of do-not, the depths of know-nothing-about-it still captured up in the slipstream and storming down several millenia of monsoon, a godawful smelly hopeless muddle bubbling with sacred hearts' barely remembered names out to seas only ideal shores prescribe and whose about-face showed clear in all the mirror's butterflied alibi's that their hacked open world wound up found in the bottom drawer of a samurai wanderer's satchel after years of east calling east in the shadowless ooze. This was the substance after all sticking my shoes to the surface of a street-paved with silver, a sky made of gold, a rainbow's pavillion structured by the heated dune turned into glass. Remarkable for how many wells dug turned dry or not. The unceasing whirlwind, the sacred becoming profane and the profane sacred and my two-cents have had both faces erased. He takes out the whole ball of wax and peels it rather like an orange and stands back holding the small orbicity of glass--what a rind it was, they will say-- into the light of the sun and his eyes burn holes into the tiny bubbles locked in ages ago. The earth seems like such a memory. The bubbles stand separate far-flung and hanging like dots in a dark sky there is no hope to connect. There is no hope but to stare long and hard and watch all the things flow through once again and repeat every action the exact same way as before with a small shift in emphasis that upsets the hand and downsends the unlikely orb rolling, imperfectly round, on its own, just as Jack, setting down his lanterns, chalks up his cue, and steps to the table to break.

24 sierpnia 09, poznań-dębina

perfecting, withstanding, inoperative, grace

2011-11-05T01:44:00.001+01:00

precision, virgilian candelabra, thrust of the evaginated relic
hoist within the cauliflower, coffee-flower
fathoming a lark's tongue
an acrid
thread

more into the weeping depths the mourner plunges
ever on the gaps and tremolos
fruited and fruitless murmurs grow
and still the web gently fingered trembles
into the crumbling wharf of the tree
extended darkly into darker waters

not without puss, snoring, sputters or wormed turntables spinning
incantible dribbles and tokes
mensural smears and a pinned-down clamoring
not without rails untenanted, mossies here and there
and sandwiches fragmentarily

bonsai at whatever rate
it unfolds
the leaf around which
its tail turns

and of course it doesnt make sense,
the phone won't work, too far from civilization, i guess.
i should have access soon
though

precision, the incidental incursion
perfecting, withstanding, inoperative
grace

poznań

july 29, 2009

formless formulation

2011-11-05T01:42:00.000+01:00

perfect, yes, but so what. so what? so what you say. after perfection so what you say. it comes down or up to this, for this, and me, for me, such an eye in this web of eyes, before the face, what and so come also quickly or prolonged. not anxiously, neccessarily but hinged with buts. okay, there is a perfect form, already, let's say. it's there. let's call it a landscape, what we can say, what i can say i love. she fills the horizon, is the horizon, and all that exists between this and that. i look at her and all is well, brilliant, perfect optimism. anything is possible. because there is this one being, this, that, her or me, the me silent and happy with that silence. she is perfect, lovely, form. why she? oh, because. because there is no psychology to explain it. because as so what? no, not yet. let's say i am like a gas and when i look at her i am contained in what i see. let's say i am fluid and when i look at her...you get the picture. the full smile of the room, the window open. combing hair, just in ear-shot, i can murmur, she can hear. birds whirl in the sky whirls the clouds and there are children, down there, courtyards across, screeching merrily, a radio, blast it, off. yes i love her, all is perfect. just dont think. but. when she goes away. what? also perfect. at least for a while. prolong it by discipline, meditation, then...eventually, then, no. don't break concentration. then, yes, you know, it happens. the question of form. my own. what or how it is. so-called personal history, itineraries autocircumscribed and perhaps vectors of will. i cannot graph them. there is a precedent, maybe even a "carreer"---the old meaning, as path. the form that it be unbroken. not a lie neccessarily, although a lie can come in, stand in, surrogate or sublimate the feeling of form, the "onward" etc. always against, working against, it seems, the other feeling of being not yet finished, unformed, formless, broken. there comes then yes almost a feeling of being broken or flawed. i emerge from being happy, contented, content, filled to being folded, failed, flawed, formless again. what? rather let me ask why. there cannot be two of me without an amputation of sorts, one i have not achieved. this is where the limitless atrocity of imagination stands in, surrogates, sublimates, cuns and connives. it is too easy to call it a lie because the lie was "truth once upon a time" even prospectively, in the future i mean because, well, time, dilating, contracting, blooming or withering on all sides of...what? doesn't matter yet...time is only of the essence in this perpetual prolificacy, this enduring flux in which even time is timed out occasionally or which my heart clocks not. try by breathing to correct it and that methodology can work, for a while. being connected to one's forms in the formlessness, faced with one's former faces and no i dont mind and even maybe love those faces that attach to my face, my or their half-faces, making the beast with two backs, two backs of the heads rather. an idea wherein one is what one wants to do and does and in doing so becomes the form of that. and also, this ends in so what. and you keep doing it until there comes a time you cannot. one says it doesnt even matter what it is one does and that even beyond politics is anyway going to get you in trouble eventually. formalism vs the atrocity of imagination. this also doesnt wash. the so-called society doesnt appear multi-disciplinary enough. one can't accept such limits. the fact i am writing music now is not recognized by musicians or those who listen to something they call music maybe. or it wont matter, suddenly (strangely enough), to the reader, to know this is music and not an attempt to warp the boards for noah's ark. enough. it is entriely personal and i say so what because i must say that this entirely personal declaration is also not wholly what it says it is. and from that point, i will go on. i must. because maybe i am wrong and in saying i am wrong maybe i am not. no, no. wrong again. tear it up.

July 29, 2009..............

2011-11-05T01:37:00.000+01:00

when as yet no poem had any title as such

2011-11-05T01:36:00.004+01:00

when thursday is yet untainted by friday's determining owls
when the cylinder yet unpowdered stands gently at attention
when morning means one full day is yet unused
when friday is not yet fooled by saturday's orgy in sunday's dumb sublimity
when there is as yet no bed made for abraham's isaac to be slain in
and a word like pesach is no different than niedziela
before one knew what one was doing so well it could be taught like art or murder
before we tried to buy something that hadnt yet been invented nor ever will exist
when i could do anything to my body knowing it would be healed miraculously
before it lay in the dust forgetting knowing nothing was something,
despairing that knowing nothing is nothing
before i glanced over my own face and saw how boring i must seem
before yesterday's flower formed a shadow over your angel's left shoulder
and the third dream's bite lost it's tail in the sun
and woke beside you who is ever what i wanted more than any dream
before any of this i was sleeping and turned from your face
and saw the divine ridges of Java's central garden
these green upon green steps for an unmanly heaven
and turned back to see a valley of rusty roses stumbling into bloom

april 21, poznan

Insomnia! An automatic essay

2011-11-05T01:32:00.003+01:00

INSOMNIA, AH!

an automatic essay...

wideness, emptiness, silence---how relativity is so relative that relating it to "my thinking" only arouses horror that its just me thinking it--the strange feeling of responsibility that I shouldn't wake up anyone to tell them because it does really seem abnormal, not a place you want to take someone, at least not on the first date---78+ hours was my longest stretch---how often it happens the first night i am sleeping with a woman no matter how nice it was and precisely despite the fact i am exhausted physically, there it is, the moon descends and sits on my shoulders, a lidless eye for a thoughtless head, a cyclops that sees and does not know why, the relativity of it so irrelevant because I sense how illusory time is itself---that all the vast arrays and observatories and particle accelerators seeking to measure time back to something forever "behind" even this "blind-thinking" eye I seem to be is really all too late---that the begining of anything is now but the future of it is hard to see without falling asleep again, that the future is hard to see without falling asleep again, that the future is really on the other side of the break from insomnia and that sleep is the problem, yes, sleep itself, it is so, so stupid, sleeping...and how yet i would like to sleep...i lay down, lights seem to flash across my closed eye-lids the images rise, faces, forms, visions, the voice of someone "inside" me---

then a memory of another insomniac bout, lasting merely 38 hours---these bouts are never the result of all-night parties or work-sessions, mind you---one wherein i discovered i had tinnittus: i was thoroughly convinced i heard a throbbing bass line from some reggae dub-upstart basement club in berlin where i was "living" and as i went from window to window several times (there were only two windows), it took me an hour to discover the source of the sound lay somehwere locked in a self-perpetuating, resonant loop of neural cilia, between the two inter-lacing fringes of these nerves which fire and vibrate in response to one another's messages---one fringe transmitting the air pressure pulsations fom the tympanum and the other receiving it, transmitting ito the cortex for deciphering of the brain, "data integration"---and how, in the case of tinnittus, the cause is an a random firing of a series of internally consistent messages that were, in this instance, extremely convincing, that had comepletely convinced me that " i was correct" in assuming there was an outward source for this sound... when in fact, to my horror, it was a bundle of errors, a sickness, a bundle of errors that was me, my body, this perceptual apparatus, this empty-chambered gun in a russian roulette of consciousness, seeking desperately to ground its charge in a some external objects...

to be at least as accurate about this "ear business" as i can possibly be: the inner ear recieves vibrations, transmits them further into the cortex: the cortex administers a re-send, a message back across the same path, a message indicating the length of the vibration, to verify the vibration or to measure it, let's say, against what is still being transmited from the tympanum into the inner ear. the result is that both of these nerve fringes vibrate together, resonate, the oscillation frequency being thusly coded (mnemotechnics), so that those of us who have learned the divisions of the code, can distinguish different levels of pitch and other sound qualities. in the case of tinnittus, the message comes only from the inside, and the outter fringe of nerves is stimulated and vibrates, this vibration is recieved in the tympanum: the illusion is that there is a "sound".

add here citations from zarathustra...

insomnia, classically: how often it happens when i am in love or think i am in love or thinking i wish i were in love or that i wasn't...how often it happens sleeping next to someone i think i no longer love because if i were awake and in love and could stir the slumbering beloved insomia would be slain and slaked by fucking...how it "dawns" on me occasionally that i have been awake too long and that i live in fear of the insomnia begining again, this endless road stretching out in front of me without drama, without any causation that does not seem prone to delusional thought, that threatens me with infinity even while i convince myself it will surely come to an end, sooner or later, this highway filled with transport vehicles 24/24...pick your own prefered symbol of monotony...

insomnia before the internet was an entiely different love affair...because the net is always, seemingly, awake, robotically at the ready, there is almost always, seemingly, someone else awake and how a chat-session, with a known or unknown other, restores discursive and rational normalcy, creates an exchange, a breathing that becomes unconscious again, a heart that does its job without being monitored...for when i am truly alone, unsleeping, i am become hyper-aware of my own body's functions and begin to travel inside the layers or interfaces of my being.

cage's experience in the anechoic chamber also seemed to be divided almost mystically into extreme frequencies, one the "high" brain funtioning and the "low" blood pulsation while anyone who was not a composer might register such an experience in a very different way, as I did once, noting how my visual field was simulataneously distorted by the small size of the anechoic room: tunnel-vision, the claustral feeling. insomnia does occur, like a very small chamber, a false vaccuum, and jar of artefice in which my consciousness appears but also paradoxically disappears into the other horizon, that of the wideness, the horizon itself appearing on the edge of a cup, on the window-sill, on the row of tenement, on the empty dark or cloudy starless city sky or murky moon or milky wherein i am waiting not-knowing i am waiting and if i am alone and i cannot read---and here, i enter the most frightening dimension of my own insomnia: the inability for consciousness to hold onto aything at all for any amount of time, whether because the pervasive lack of neuro-chemical presences destroys the short term memory and language cannot be made to cohere in my mind or because the insomnia is a hard, lonely diamond-like and jealous god who will not permit any distraction that will lead to drowsiness---for whatever reason, the words hang on the page like laundry on a line blowing in the breeze, each word a rag on a wire and how and why did they became strung together i cannot decipher. and there is no way to be entertained it seems. everything seems like flotsam and jetsam and even my own thoughts ride on the flow of...what?
it does not even flow...it just hangs, a cosmic limbo...

one would almost prefer a war be raging in the streets than this and this nihilistic thought haunts me only for a split-second because i know in this state how utterly impotent i am to bring about such a war and even if i knew mechanically how to bring it about would not be able to carry through the step-by-step instructions to assemble such a machine.

if i were to situate my senses in a quincunx, debatable as these divisions are from the point of view of science---knowing as "we" do, how closely interwoven the visual and auditory nerves are, for example, so that in effect one sense is always refering to data gathered by the other sense or, knowing how tasting and smelling are difficult to isolate from their mutual complementarity---if i were to put them nevertheless into four points and draw them into a central point, it is in the case of insomnia that the acute awareness of the inexistence of the point of so-called integration becomes painfully evident and hopelessly open. and it is from this repeated experience i claim now that i can make no conclusion? i beg the reader to take me seriously and yet i must indicate that i am somehow yet unable to lend myself any credibility. i am trying to be as honest as i can possibly be, writing as quickly as i can, not searching endlessly for mot juste, because i do not believe there is one word that is right, no one modulus for the experience of the static and undying disturbance of the shells of existence.

insomnia and substances. like smoking or drinking or pills, if you have such luxuries. they never work in the case of a real insomniac episode. i can drink unto stumbling and fall dizzy into bed and of course i am then too sick to be able to sleep for the convulsions of nausea. any barbituate solution puts you at risk of over-dosing and although i have thought in these insomniac states all the permutations of suicidal possibilities that "gets one through many a night", i am not confident in death as being different enough than this, than this insomnia experience itself, to count as a real alternative. i have smoked a pack of cigarrettes and it only increased my heart rate to the point of utter panic and the need to just stop, take a rest, just lay down and....nothing of the not-nothing...no...somnia in veiled robes of fleece does not come and wrap my mind in downy visions or enigmatic morphean plasmas...

on one insomniac night in particular, while smoking, i was seized by the determination to do something useful and hauled out the vaccum cleaner and, with the cigarrete clamped in my mouth, running the nozzle over the floors, enjoying at least the power of this machine made for sucking and inadvertanly bumped the door in such a way as caused the ejection of the light, the cinder or pharos, the burning bit, from the cigarrette itself and i watched in a suspended moment as it or I fell through the air, like a pilot ejected from a nose-diving plane, and the cinder fell on the floor near the snout of the vacuum cleaner and poof. it was gone. it is funny: i saw myself in the mirror and the look on my face made me laugh. i shut off the machine immediately and sat down looking at it. what, now, will happen to this red silent domestic robot that, in belgium at least, one calls a "hoover". of course there is not enough oxygen for a fire to burn in there. and indeed, it stated to emit fumes and my imagination was captrured inside this enclosed infernal microcosm. and the fire inside its belly turned to the plastic and rubber detritus and started to stink and i hurriedly dragged it by the neck to kitchen sink and while reasonable enough to not want to pour water on a plugged-in electrical appliance and yet unreasonable enough to open the burning machine and pull out the bag, which burst immediately, flames and smoke blossoming and yet fortunately falling from my unscathed hand directly into the sink, i was able to slap the faucet up. and in seconds all but the rotten fumes had passed. could i call this the poetry of insomnia in action? i cannot tell.

there is of course the widespread and creeping thought virus that insists insomnia can be cured my some kind of meditation. but i am convinced that they are mostly other forms of insomnia themselves and that it is only the style of dress that changes as we pass from land to land. and while i do find certain mantras to be pleasurable to practice and still recall with wonder the tibetans compressing their deep overtones into golden pills, i have been so often accused of spiritualist pretensions that i cannot stand before the scientific community and deliver any kind of report that does not seem like a long and complicated dream: that is, a kind of narrative salve and balm to work into the muscles of the over-active mind and bring the opiate of sleep to englobe us, especailly since all while it does occur to me that capitalism itself thrives on our insomniac innovations like a vampire, sucking the ideas for more functional systems out of the combinatorium the mind becomes during such pointless demonic wrestlessness. if this in fact were to prove to be the beneficent side of insomnia, then it will have maybe redeemed itself in the "spirit of progress". but i remain largely untouched by such luck and my sleeplessness rests apparently in no detectable marketability.

April 1, 2009
Poznan

Virtuous Circles CD notes (Absurd Records)

2011-11-05T01:29:00.000+01:00

Virtuous Circles

“Noi non vediamo mai le cose una prima volta, ma sempre la seconda.” –Cesare Pavese

Ramadan 1427

I am living in Kreuzberg, a part of Berlin which is, commonly thought of as a “Turkish” neighborhood. But once you scratch the surface and wander these streets which eventually mingle with those of Neukolln, you begin to notice many diverse cultures of Middle Eastern origin are also mixed in. Neukolln has an extreme unemployment rate, numerous “unpapered” immigrants and visible poverty. One day in October, 2006 with the air taking on that onerous hint of Northern European winter, I heard a song on the lips of certain people, but never a muzzein singing from a nasally tower megaphone. Although you will daily notice the bells of Christian churches, the song that brings the Islamic world to pray five times daily is largely absent from the streets of Berlin. What you hear of course is the rumble and jog of various kinds of machines and devices of telecommunication. It would be a controversial statement if I were to say that Islam is the last vestige of Medieval culture that lives on into the world of High Capitalism. But to insist on a dichotomy between Islamic culture and Commerce would be a complete misrepresentation of the central role of travel and trade in the spread of Islam throughout the world. I found myself thinking about the adhan which I have heard in various cities, sung by so many voices ranging from a devastatingly beautiful cry of love that might bring tears to your eyes to the hilarious warbling of a tone-deaf muzzein sputtering and crackling in a hopelesly short-circuited P.A. system. If the prayer is one manner in which the Muslim approaches and defines her relationship to God and a duty paid to the religion, I had again that strange thought “what is the God of Capitalism?” If God is a limitless and invisible source of such vocal aspirations in Islam and also their direct object, one cannot grasp its core anywhere except in one’s heart. If God is the fuel of religion, what is the fuel of the secular world we live in with its litanies of transport, industry, televisions, cell-phones, sms, laptops, digital datebooks etc etc. The major cult-leaders of Capital will tell you it is “Freedom”. But I am not convinced that there is a freedom in Capitalism anymore than there is a God seated in a celestial pleroma dictating laws to man and womankind. Many people will drown the pointless work-day in a round of pints or erase their office memories with sake. Others will go to a mosque or perform a Buddhist chant. Others make art or family their religion. What motivates life in the world of Capitalsim when the daily hostilities of competition are themselves the very negation of the value of “communal” life? What drives this religion of competitive capitalism that no one dares to deviate from? And what is our relationship to the noise of our competitive culture?

This recording/performance will not answer any of these questions for you. But it will reflect the dynamic interplay between noises and trans-ascendance, between a song and the source of a song. And so, it draws a vicious circle around us. What might be done to make it a virtuous circle? A gravestone I saw in Charleston, South Carolina reads: “She done what she could”. I will leave the rest to you.

I chose a live recording of my concert in Athens as the starting point for this project probably because as the capital of Greece it represents for me the final, physical fulcrum between the west and the east. But also because in the analysis of Greek culture one can see that sea-faring and commerce are central to the expansion of that culture and forms the metaphorical basis for international relations. As Constantinople, it became the center of Christianity, then pried away by the Turks, the Saracens, the Ottomans. Whatever they were called in the Infidel story-books, they were the contenders, the ones who wanted the same advantageous port for the spread of their wealth. It was the object of a Holy War. We, today, each and everyone of us, are the objects of a Holy War but one without any Gods. It is a war instead between Freedom and Capitalism in which Islam is forced to wear the mask of the world’s worst tendencies. Instead, these tendencies are in our very own limitless drive for a contradictory Freedom that creates alienation between human beings and other life forms and a mediated inward search through nostalgia and escapism.

Phonographies used in this piece were made in Berlin, Paris, San Franscisco, NYC (all industry and transport sounds) and Java, Morrocco, Kenya, Egypt and Iraq (most of the voices you hear). It is for the last item that I owe thanks to Thomas Ashcraft.

There is God in Godless. But there is also more in less.

Jeff Gburek
October 18, 2006
Berlin

This document premiered February 8, 2007 at Das Kleines Field Recordings Festival, Berlin on the, “Tag der Klanggeschicten”, @ Klub Monty. Special thanks: to Rinus Van Alebeek for making this festival happen; to Mireia Guzman for photos and being there.
It was subsequently re-published inside the CD released on Absurd Records, 2008
Question of Re-entry series, thanks to Nicolas Malevitsis.
http://www.void.gr/absurd/index2.htm

astra disastra digitalis

2011-11-05T01:28:00.001+01:00

The old and broken doll with twisted digits
drawn through a gap in the heart or the sky
sits in a cornered clump in rusted rags;
tilted head, half open, mannequin’s eyes
mourning a dead lover’s muted sperm
a silent squawk-box buried in her belly,
limbo of robotic baby-speak---ah, what went dead
inside you first? Your double d battteries? Corroded
triple-a, excremental, chemical cylinders of charge?
Who put your throat’s papery violin to sleep?
When did you put your eyes in your pocket, again?

And you, ancient doll, who threw herself
in the throes of the dance and broke her spine,
“il se prend pour un star”
yes, there are stars, too hot to handle, and stars
too far to be seen by the blind, signed
Mr. F. Lubbard, yes, stars, collapsing the yes,
virgin aureaolae, depths upon steps of
depths, skin deep, vanishing
at the universal boundary of information
seen in this coal-dark basement
in a broken tarnished mirror
on a bright and empty chair
when I was 5.

You, red and fair daughter of distant Danes
and Liths, remind me of all the girls and boys
swirling in the pockets of resistance, fighting for the freedom of islands,
the two fern-green, lime-green
planets of vanity and fertility
set in one skull’s orbit, crooked teeth
signature, suture, singularity.

Have I taken the small things growing larger with time seriously?

There is a dead television screaming
an ingenuous formal pornography, dull grey
cyclopean consumerist identity, saying
go lick the cock and balls of money
handled by many
take the disease
your dreams by the ounce
permit you to buy.

Love is not a trial, can’t be won
by any lawyers
and there is no judge of it.
Love’s only god is love.
And there is no love but love.
It is not a moral issue at all.
It is Elan. Succulent paradise, promised.
Go towards your heart’s goal.
Go through my gate.
Or through the gate of others.
Or remain inside your dark house of memory
And pass through yourself.
Hold me so I can love you.
Or free me to love others.
Without love, being unable to love,
I am dead, dumb fruit withers. I want to live
And yet I am dead? Or hanging, drooping
Earthwards, wishing, I were, already?
This is death’s spurious circle.
I want to step outside it, for now.

With you or without you.

Come, let me go.

“and on the night of their departure they noticed burning a star”

in a crystal quiver
I see symphonies of eyes
shot out from me
some spectacular night
on the fringes of time

March 14, 2009
10.28 pm
Poznan. Polska

the jar beneath the star artaud foresaw/as having already exploded

2011-11-05T01:26:00.000+01:00

the jar beneath the star artaud foresaw/as having already exploded

it was cruelty to laugh at, not with, the man laughing at cruelty itself
he saw the blink and black-out, the thread consciousness was not, but must
evolve out from...it was like the golden lid of a wandering jar.
where-ever the lid was placed, the jar would form, beneath it,
no matter what size, perfectly fit, screwed tight
and each jar beneath it like a drop of transparency,
the jar always empty, the whole star, his star
the collapsing and rising foal...

in the vivid looms of consciousness,
the thread of not-seeing, not-feeling, not-perceiving,
the binary and bipolar gloom --so-called--
is repeatedly woven, as the unwoven
or the unweaving, Penelope's trick
against these vulgar suitors of singular Time

her hand is woven into the scarf, the glove
her eyes are woven into the shroud
her breasts are woven into the dress
memory of the flesh wears

i feel i know well now Penelope's loom
weaving and unweaving the cloth,
seeding and salting the earth of thought by turns,
doubting and redoubting death's shroud
until my true love, my truth, comes home...
I could call her Odysseeus.
Fair and red and blond at her mons.

Am I not seeing blindly like Tiresias,
inverted, converted, the liver
of Prometheus, whose day chained
to the rock of Poznan
is only slightly unlike nightmare?
while somehwere on the steppe
sun shines newly on the next foal
of Przewalski's horses

Poznań, 10 march 09

excerpt from an italian tour journal 2006

2011-11-05T01:02:00.000+01:00

"you my friend have put too much thinking in your hearing
and all the skies are drying out.
let things get wet.
mud is good clothing.
if anything is wrong, ask yourself in ten years time
if you will have any new devices.
this is no different than small mall town America...
everything is made of symbols. Bergamo? this deck is missing
quite a few cards. the real lost card is the same as any other lost card.
things that remind us of other things are wrong.
things that make us forget others things are wrong.
things that make us remember other things
that make us forget other things that rob us of our time
and burn our lives in the furnace of commodities. Don't cry
about it, there are many many sheep in the fields of Treviglio
just as there are beautiful women with cellphones
full of unwanted messages. If the tax people audit me
it will be proof at last I have existed and made nothing from it.
Instead of my own nap
I have taken yours and stolen your dreams
which I know you yourself have acquired by impure means.
I should rather have used my mental acid
to have penetrated my own devious machines. No matter how many times you open the door
she is not there or at least she does not appear...no Santa Claus...
instead its Milano itself arriving on track 5
none of us ever have moved in the late afternoon lambent light
of patent leather shoes, prosciutto cotto
and the deglassing salt of the tracks
that sprays in our eyes"

december, 23, 2006

A Dinner Dyadic

2011-11-05T00:52:00.001+01:00

A Dinner Dyadic

A restauraunt
tells a certain story
about food
to the person
eating it, a sauce
of discourses & condiment
accompany the raw
or cooked fable
and one can’t tell a convinced
Emperor his new
clothes are not
in fact fine.

But the one outside
the restaurant, the one not eating this narrative
eats instead a silence
surrounding it all
and adds salt from memory,
speculative pepper, deducing
in the heat,
sensing something’s not quite right,
knowing she’s not sure what.

Upon the window of the restaurant,
a code of sweat pearls
or maybe it just rained.
On one side the rain-drops are flat
against the plane of the glass.
On the other side they bulge out,
round and fat.

6.03.09
Konin, Polska

silent other, sideless mirror (2008)

2011-11-05T00:41:00.003+01:00

silent other, sideless mirror, gaze through which sabled murmur
pulls the threaded feathers, to dress the wedding dummy
her own hands, her flesh velour

she who gowns the world and drowns sorrows
with her alien eyes fixed to impenetrable beauty, gnarled,
and tightens the fine frailties of voice into raucous mesh

our nerves, the carnivorous spool, the light trapped within
the web, our teeth, the mind, the eating that is not eating, not eaten
and the great trails of color left by wandering hands

across the phantom hours and dours of night
i follow the wind-scattered pulse
across the grey scintillant gunks of the Meuse

to the tree-trestled street where the tombstones shine and whistle
deathless tunes of the Miners, the hill-men
who see you sewing the dresses of the one's ever glinting
on the border of the unborn

i walk again to your stainless window
to see the red leaves and castagne
laid by your hands in the lace of the sun
and recall your bifocals, intent, bent,

simply working mundanity
i have never been able to understand

Juin 11, 2008,
Liege, Belgique

notes:

The Meuse is the river that runs through Liege
where, walking one day, I recalled vividly a scene from Berlin.
The graveyard is in Berlin on the Bergmannstrasse.
"Bergmann" means "miner" or "man of the hills"
There is timeless shop there, a wedding dress,
a woman who clothes the brides, working alone, at times.
Her name is Milena Geburzi. Her last name, they say, means
"midwife".

dreaming machines for karolina maria konstancja ossowska

2011-11-05T00:38:00.002+01:00

gazing into the reality of desire

i only see you again. and when i cannot speak to you, it is as if my own ear were torn off.
the taste of your voice before sleep, precious metal, liquid, fantastic resource.
red streaks on the inner thigh of memory. these are the hormonal enchantments of life.
the child, the key to inner reality, it all comes forth, through you, for me.
and when not...nervous nightmare, i am hooves faltered in mud.
my flower of mind throws you desperate spore.
drawing myself in again, the pale doctrine of my own perplexed neccessity,
fair, like your flesh, grows flush, brightens, glows,
subtly beating wings of a moon,
frothing the oceans of sleep, silently.

6 lutego 2009
poznan

after glancing back over pasolini

2011-11-05T00:26:00.002+01:00

for lee foust

from the first words, "solo il amare, solo il conoscere/conta..."
"only loving, only knowing/matters
not having loved, not having known.."
i see my old friend, he, my old friend, you
arrives in an image, inside an image, of the poem

at once announcing the moment, the eternal break with(in) "history"
(that repeats itself in unbroken successions
of miserable bastard cacophonies, wars for peace
and fleshless dreamers---like skeletons dug form the rubbles of gaza---

and yet faces into the world, benjamin's angel, the mouth of klee
"set at the margin", so to speak a foregone apocalypse
in which survivors scrounge in dirt and rubbish,
the ones who carry history nevertheless like a senseless bag
full of deposit bottles, in exchange for a future

repetitious, anxious, yet brimming with the possibility
knowing thirst unvanquishible, the tongue yearning,
replacing their teeth in advanced age, limping and smiling forward
(with whatever backlashed dreams and dead families
those same smiles mask over)

reminding me all again this morning
on my kasprzaka street stairs
the old lady descending, one slippered foot swollen, unbootably
the other boot cautious, testing her step
hand glued to the gleaming railing, eyes on a distant goal,
did not betray seeing me

as i was out into frigid air and
already whisking back again, she was only out the door
moving so steadily, barely--where-ever--
into that wind
i was coming from...
that i thought myself
so much weaker than she

02.2.09-------------- Poznań

2011-11-05T00:23:00.000+01:00

apparition between memory and forgetting

2011-11-05T00:19:00.002+01:00

if there are dandelions left

growing in winter

it will certainly be

an all night affair

i said to myself
just as you closed the door...

somewhere between
house and home

some missed destination
between brain and bone

some combination
between nowhere gone
and nowhere to go

comes
in an apparition
a bright leaf
on a once broken bough

somehow
a veined leaf--falls--
an apparition
or a chemical
cloud

a wave or tickle
between memory
& forgetting
calls

an apparition
a face
knowing nothing
and more than that all

a worm of spring
a touch of gold

once a shadow
an apparition
between memory
& forgetting

it could be that
just that
an endless more

between rouge and soot
between the shoe and the boot
it could be that
and nothing more
everything to share

and i said to myself
as you closed the door

if there are dandelions left
growing in winter
it will certainly be
an all night affair

25.1.09
poznan

THESES IN NOISE II

2008-03-29T18:47:00.002+01:00

CONTRA/other THESES ON NOISE

1)Noise is centrifugal, not centripital. There can be no consensus on Noise. Noise moves away from all centers of identification. There will always be more Noise than one can listen to. Inappropriateness is the priority of Noise.

2)Mothers against Noise(M.A.N.)is most likely a creation of the publicity department of Village Youth ltd., a NYC based corporation involved in bringing noise in line with corporate marketing standards for decades.

3) Noise is not an object (nor an objective) but rather a complex of occasions. One cannot be a Noisicean for the very same reason musicians are not in control of muses. One controls a vehicle for delivery but not what it carries: who can tell the truck-load of chickens when to cluck? Noise cannot be shaped.

4) One is at the mercy of noise. Noise is not always heard. While it is true that the largest of our noises tend to be noticeable socially, there is also another level to Noise that is infra/super/sonic. Our bodies are carriers of this noise. Noise is deeper than any throat.

5) Noise is a method of displacement of energy. Like the calm of the storm, it is only temporary. Noise cannot survive. Noise is anxious about nothing. There are no devices that record/register Noise.

Jeff Gburek

June 26, 2006

Berlin, Allemagne

Eurasia

THESES IN NOISE

2008-03-29T18:39:00.004+01:00

Theses on Noise

I What the fuck is Noise? Precisely because of its indeterminacy noise is the most sensuous human activity / practice. To try to fix it or to make it a genre is as fucked up as believing in democracy.

II If you make noise it is likely that somebody else is going to hear you,
this means Noise is a social activity.

III The capacity to make Noise is available to all, but its revolutionary
potential comes from those who want to disturb the commodification of
Noise - as M.A.N point out in their website www.mothersagainstnoise.us.

IV To say “this is good Noise” or “that is bad Noise” is to miss the point.

V Noise without meaning nor finality is revolutionary as long as it does
not support anything or anybody.

VI This is not to say that Noise under capitalism can be an autonomous
activity. But if neither language nor bombs help you to destroy our
reality, Noise helps us to get rid of our anxiety.

VII It is more important to fuck the minds of the audience than to fuck your
ears - and vice versa.

VIII The identity process that occurs as people are making Noise must be
constantly rejected. To be a “Noisician” is even more pathetic than to
be a “musician”.

IX Factory workers in the previous centuries have indirectly been the most
sustained and brutal players of Noise. Recognition of our past should
always be present.

X Economic exploitation still occurs, even if now the production of Noise
does not produce an object. The process of Noise making has in itself
become the object of financial and symbolic market value.

XI The old conception of noise was to believe in freedom, the new
conception of Noise is to achieve freedom.

Mattin 25th May 2006, London Anti-Copyright
www.mattin.org

NOT ABOUT IMPROVISATION

2008-03-29T18:29:00.002+01:00

all sounds being singular and unrepeatable, every sound must in fact be improvised. improvised, in this sense, must mean that there is something in the event of sound that is unforeseen. a sound in which the unforeseen happens. the improvised is the imprevised, the imprevisible. even the sounds in a composed sequence will, if slowed down or sped up, either in actual execution or through manipulation of a recording, will reveal the instabilities and stabilities that return to each sound this crisis of the border.

the improvised has a profile in the unforeseable and therefore the invisible of a therefrom or unto

that which we call the silence

that which i call the stone

ANAGYWNAS: THE IMPENETRABLE SILENCE OF STONE

2007-06-26T13:44:00.000+02:00

The following was included in a performance at the new Staalplaat in Berlin

http://www.lepetitmignon.de/

The improvised preamble, however, ended in this manner:

...I have a few times received suspicious emails from people doing geneaology searches…my surname, Gburek, is Polish…my surname, I was told a few years ago, means something like Grumpy and Obstinate Man…so a few weeks ago I received an email from a woman in Poland searching for her tribes-people and at the end of the exchange she said we must have relatives in common because “after all, you know that Gburek is not a very popular name”… and in fact a Pole I met in Berlin asked me if I knew what my name means in Polish and since I did not know he said, after a slight pause, “he is always a little man who is very rude and farts and belches at the dinner table and speaks very loudly and usually he always ask you for money that he never pays back and he has very bad sexual habits…” and so forth and so on, so you can see Polish people have a very extreme sense of humor and like to exaggerate quite a lot…and when I met the Polish musicians and composers in Darmstadt last year each one of them at least was very quick to laugh when I told them my last name…

Anyways, in Poland, they say that the very first city was built around the vicinity of a great mountain which I will call the Nameless Mountain…I call it nameless because of an intuition that the mountain itself did not care too much about the names given to it

So it is said that Anagywnas—or someone calling himself
Anagywnas (we are not sure also if it was male
or female or both or neither)
Anagywnas said—we assume he said it to someone, but in fact, we don’t know
the name of the people, his tribe, or what kind of creatures they were or if he had a people—
Anagywnas said, the first problem “we” have is the STONE—meaning, the HARD
Mountain before his Eye---
IT WILL NOT MOVE AND IT REFUSES TO SPEAK.
And so….
Anagwynas invented VIOLENCE, thinking maybe Violence would help him find a way
To get from the mountain what was needed.
Now, Violence didn’t want to go. But being an Invention, it was forced, like any other TOOL, toward doing something—while Violence truly didn’t feel like it had anything to prove and might prefer to sleep in the dark matter of the universe…

Anagywnas nevertheless took Violence to the Mountain.
He first made a huge column of AIR and projected this from his LUNGS
Through a kind of TUBE. The Mountain typically replied with SILENCE.
Having heard the reply of SILENCE,
Anagywnas shouted,
“WHAT? …DID YOU SAY: ‘VIOLENCE’? …TO ME?”
When Silence was heard again,
Anagywnas, sure of himself now, and very brave, began to smash Mountain into pieces.
Expending great energies, his Violence was still great, while indifferent.
But then Anagywnas began to see that all the broken pieces were not regular.
Each one was different and worse than expected each one was equally silent, no matter how much violence was applied. He did not find what was needed.
And Anagywnas regretted smashing the Mountain and decided to put it all back together using a mixture of mucous and blood as a kind of glue.
It was difficult work. There was something missing. The shape of the restored Mountain was not like he remembered it. There was a more fragile integrity than before and it was in this that Anagywnas discovered SPACES. Everywhere there were Gaps and Spaces that caused great instability. The Spaces were interesting. Animals started immediately to occupy the Spaces. And so the first city in Poland came to be formed. It was always falling apart, undergoing disruption. The noise of sex and indigestions of the animals underground caused the city to fall apart quite often. Everyone tried to hear Silence
But it was not possible anymore to hear Silence. The arguments over how to put the city together were endless and unhappy. And stones sometimes disappeared. The inability to find silence caused some of the animals to go and find another place to live.
And the animals that succeeded were never heard from again.

Material for sound: stones from Wannsee, Alps, New Mexico, Athens; layed-out guitar with piezo and telephone pick-up; two looping pedals; mixing board; two guitar amplifiers.

Procedures: Speaking, reading, suspending stones above magnetic coils of guitar until vibrational field changes are appreciable in output. This may entail turning stones in various ways. Eventually most stones on top of guitar, experience of these in many configurations produce varieties of textures. Stop when you feel like “it”.

Jeff Gburek
June 21, 2007
Le Petit Mignon//StaalplaatBerlin

Apropos Yannick Dauby's Hybridism

2007-06-26T12:24:00.001+02:00

On a train ride from Berlin to Gdansk, I encountered that laminal experience wherein not only auditory consciousness gains access to the deepest internal and bodily experience of hearing that is the externally silent transversal of dreams but also the sensitivity grew that there was indeed a code that could be discerned in it all and a way to translate it sensibly. While the wheels where running and I tried desperately for hours to doze off, there came that peculiar leveling of the hearing, the one in which there is no longer judgment made over the signal to message ratio of sounds and they all became equal partners in a weaving of sonorous percussivities that merits deeper political consideration. While mankind makes sounds to be heard across nature, all of nature works simultaneously and without interruption across all the sound we make trying to communicate and, in theory at least, retains the power of feeling less self-important. That is why these sounds can ooze back into the bodily folds and maintain a relation with our elemental and animal fundament. We cannot detach, for all our mass miscommunications, from the overall pulse of the elementalities riding through wave-forms and which in our atmosphere render audible gusts from the distant comminglings of winds. But when I was searching most to sleep, encountering this interpenetration of spheres, to take the Cagean or Kabbalstic phrase, I was simultaneously having the visionary experience of the backs of my eye-lids and the light trapped in the brain flashing like so many retinal flowers of rods and cone. Eventually, a strangely red glow formed on the wall of the cabin and I found my entire being sucked with the glee of a renegade autonomous vacuum cleaner into this unlikely portal. I immediately found myself adrift amidst corpuscular beings, strands that I could perceive following variable geometric patterns, the roseaceous and laser pontillist figures metamorphosing in seeming randomness and yet sensibly evolutionary, with a grade of steadiness that defied our clock’s temporalities. These fields of swarming fireflies opened their wings to let small sounds out from glands secreted therein and, yes, they appeared also to be rufflings of wings that visually stimulated some cortex to send a buzzing into my ears. This condition of sound created internally that some call tinnitus is in fact a place of maddening resonance with the usually forgotten pulsations outside us.

I then recognized that the laser points constituting these strands bore a unique resemblance to the stochastic elements of field recording that, if left to spin in discs of their own design, would create unpredictable but also curiously consistent and observable family relationships. In fact, these once monocellular creatures began to assume the shape that we can recognize as part of our ancient and contemporary bestiaries but imbued with a completely plastic character that admitted of miscegenations and foetai that were half-moose and human, half-deer and lobster, birds with long fertilizing noses that resemble the flowers’ pistils. In short, these were hybrids. Their sonic emmittances where similar to what I described above visually. Their fur made a sound that was as loud as the leaves they rubbed against wandering their forlorn and shrinking forest in the rural stretches beside the rail-road tracks of Poland. The birds became extremely fluent in their passages from one species to another and they accelerated the rate of the movement of the light locked into and emitted from the corpusculars. One of these transitionary entities had a particular taste for my ear and while the ear seemed to grow towards this luminous animal it also descended into and traced the contours and convolutions of the spiral with a gentle and caring ligament somewhat like a tongue. It was soon to be revealed, however, that, while this seeming paradise could not be detached from the alarming rates of movement provided by noisy and noxious machines, and the fact it was in Poland, the train had ceased to move. The birds were singing now, now staccato, now, this, that, the other. Tweets, chitters, piffs, clips and shirrils and it was then I opened my eyes to see between the slit of the curtains that we where--somehwere--in a station. A female voice came stra-melodically over the speakers repeating what we can now assume to be the schedule and track changes for unseen trains en route to or in patenza from that "whatever" place. It was perhaps one of the most beautiful sounds I'd ever heard a train-station exude.

If we can mix sonic realms, does this not give us a great opportunity, perhaps before dreamed but never given to all as a platform for personal psychic experimentation until the present moments, to encounter a cross-pollinization of substances drifting in the universe and coalescing into vibrant sacs of aural intensity? And from the auditory intercalation, we can imagine a genetics of sound, a place where the splicing of originary elements of nucleic acids is mirrored in this organic mash-up of songs, those which mingle together in our minds and bodies but which also emerge from them the way croaks do from frogs. It could be that in phonography lay a key to those shamanistic or otherwise indecipherable amalgams of forms we see in the ancient caves and petroglyphs, the graffiti whose cascades and cadences announce the birth of a singularity culminated from the generations and yet giving us an awareness of the sacrificial ingestions that of necessity sustain us. Therein I think reside both an ethics and an ecology that is not easily reducible to the rationality standing over and against us in the capitalist and corporate ontologies of exploitation. We can emerge yet from the corpuscular clouds of, and with some new, information. Composition and hybridization creates the possibility of recomposing a great masterwork that is unfinished and its forms sui generis follow from the hybrids that are not so much an engineering as they are a shape discerned necessary and beautiful in decomposition. And in the analysis of its hidden life forms we find in the materiality of sound a music informed by the noise that perches on the barriers of culture.

Jeff Gburek
Feb. 10.07
Berlin

Muslimgauze Revisited

2007-01-24T17:53:00.001+01:00

I begin with a return. To a certain musical territory. Sept.17.06, Berlin

Muslim Gauze Revisited
In the caustic feedback washes of a magical recording machine the memory of humanity beats its hands against the tightened skins of animals it has slain and eaten in order to contain its overactive brain growing mosques and churches and cities (ever outward and ever inward) until something snaps and the house of cards wins our hand. Why are these recording so alive? When the Cold War had yet to be graced by Gorbachev’s beauty mark there was a militant Islam that in a way must have convinced us Godless whining leftists, of, for example, the struggles of the Palestinian people. All the Sufism pressed against the Wahabism (and its repressed necromancy) does not seem to achieve any longer the balance between the fear of apocalypse and the communal celebration of the fall of the oppressive State that might allow us to enjoy the risk of what this music means. What is revealed in this enthusiastic slapping, this slap-back again, this agglomerated cacophony of ordered devotions to the empty resonance of a feeding trough struck by sticks, this calamity of cowbells, mangled sarods and stampeded subwoofers ? Once cut into a rotatable dish of petroleum by-product, or spooled around one of those infinite cassette releases Bryn Jones made in the 80’s, it is now mathematical measures of data lightly lasered into a small discs then only nerdly imaginations. The recording however is a monument not to “music” but to the ability to remember and situate an entire paradigm shift away from a liberationist oppositional culture carried over into to a disenchanted orientalizing package presentation of the current moment. The Thatcherism of those days has only morphed into the role-playing of the self-deputized people-duping protection of illusory democratic freedoms that, pitched in a battle against the shadows of Islam—not the careful study and analysis of its internal laws---has only been able to rend open the crisis in the concept of the Law once again. Not only Kafka’s but that of the Enlightenment which did rather worry itself about the internal as well as the external apparatus of control. It is really only in the torn space between shari’a and the “rights of man” (read: the disastrous results of Global Corporatism) that this music is at all dance-able. It is within a more absolute post-modern “condition” that Levinas’ observation is true: “when I dance my mind stands in one place”. That was not always the case, however. This music reminds me the mind danced once widely filled with ecstatic hope for a tomorrow of abolished sorrows.