THE STUTTER SPEAKS FOR ITSELF ALONE

"a portable altar strapped on his back/ pure and severe"  --
-- pythagorean silence, Susan Howe

 TEN YEARS AGO, I founded this blog, stealing my title from Antonin Artaud, with the aims of a person with different aims, in a world where aims were different, where social media such as myspace, tumbler, twitter and the monolothic succubus facebook were nascent, a world where one was achieving social difference because one had a web identity, constituted by a website, a wikipedia article, a page with review links, a digital nomad tag, the signs of one aspiring redittor someone, or someone already someone YOU NEED TO KNOW, and all the attendant pretentious truffles and trifles. For many years previously I had a website under the name Orphan Sounds, kept at Noe Cuellar's futurevessel.com, until it was hacked or I became otherwise unknowable. And while some of my aims have shifted in perspective, one aim be yet true, the true itself, named (variously) after the affirmation of "seraphic pleasure" of consensual fucking, the arrival on the shores of Artaud's text of the bodily truth, that remains the song forever changing through ceaseless modulations of silence, the word that repression and oppression might end within. Artaud's Transparent Abelard being a surrealist's celebration of libido had to my mind that link to the search for truth via dialectic of the 12th century theologian (Pierre Abelard) and the love(r) of literature (Héloïse d'Argenteuil) and their tantric union, a myth to herald the end of the Dark Ages. So it's an eternal incipit, let's say, both selva oscura and vita nova, tangled up and blue...as if I had known... The stutter speaks for itself, alone...

"And he said:
"Oh, Abelard!" as if the topic
Were much too abstruse for his comprehension..."

That this blog-basis in the Transparency of an Unameable Ecstacy, what my friend recently called Bewilderness, which remains true, (even if he didn't say it), that this was not only about the carnal but also about the celestial, cosmic, the post-coital & quantum entanglement, the end of excluded middles of all sorts, only goes to say that it's all about what it cannot be about. Ever. Yet strives to be. Authentic, even falsely (as Fernando Pessao might have put it). Moreover, the continuity of my writing this blog remains in the notion of truth Olson wrote of which consists in standing more revealed but, with the new perspective, that the most revealed is also the most flat, unprepared, unadorned, naked, even without scandal, at times. So bold and potent that it passes for banal. In Jim Jarmusch's recent film, Paterson, this character, who remains the city, the almost Blakean eternal one of the dream, the great figure, the anonymous rock (WCW) Paterson: a poet and no-one, a listener. When his girl-friend urges him to publish, and even speaks to him about the trumpet image in the Ohio Bluetip Matches in the poem she has never heard him recite, and he knows. Maybe the poems are all cribbed from things there no ideas but within. The poet knows only or only knows the sources of the real and that the only thing standing in between is some nameless illusion we can't fathom.
Strike anywhere, they say. Water Falls. "Hey, what's that from?"

  So he stood on the island— over the sea
Until creation was a cone with polished sides."
-- George Oppen

                                             


 final photo: Park Wilsona, Poznan
  all others internet archives
I believe the far left an image of
Père Lachaise, Paris 
but I've never been to the alleged tomb
of Abelard & Heloise. It is believed
by many they are not there, or not both
& yet one hears the pilgrim letters
of forlorn lovers
litter the stones

Preview Of Hyperions, Upccoming Album by Ossowksa & Gburek

https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/hyperions-4-bialowieza-ossowskagburek

                                                     hyperions full audio coming soon
plus a few concerts in Warsaw

Staggered out from under the Pole-Star: a text designed for digital stutter.

I would like to say
 Simply that I love you
Hung within my night sky a stutter
  The winds begin to gather
Hollow as a chimney's throat
    The days go wandering
  On the feet of destiny
Driven divers directions
    And words adrift
   That dare to lift the voice
       Of the leaves meeting at
     Distant cross-roads
        Bundle silently like tangerines
            In a wicker-basket
          Woven by we know not who
        But follow broken
          By the terrifying weakness
        Of our Western-Eastern self-conception
           That we beg any agency
               Intercede and distract
           Against inevitable
             Uncontrollable gravity's wanton
          Grasp of solace measured
               By a single feather
            Stuck sullenly in a drain-pipe
                Somewhere and nowhere (simultaneously)
                     Stirred in the grains
                  Between the grains of the griot's
                     Gourds transforming
                   Seasonal emptiness into
                       The full figure fathoming
                      The thrust of her snow-blind thighs
                           Dancing on the eaves
                         As Cinder Ella
                             Her tennis sprung
                           By tarry lumps
                         & rabbits hidden
                            In the hats of the Sweeps
                        Who swoop down
                     & pull her up
                        Into the cool grip of the dwarf star


21.12.14

When I was alone. And then suddenly more alone. Reflections on Derek Bailey. And playing with quanta..

what he had to say on one occassion about it

Derek Bailey remains, remained, something of a myth, one of those great legendary figures, a basilica on a gigantic toadstool outside of time, titanic Hendrix or faustian devil-may-care Robert Johnson or Manitas de Plata cross-eyed by Webern, even while he, the good Derek of Sheffield, was yet breathing among us, even  -- after I had met players like Jack Wright & Daniel Carter, Oxley, Parker -- and started to learn that musicians were (some of them, anyway) approachable human beings. But I never approached Derek Bailey, despite his tremendous influence on my life. After listening to him on tht album with Braxton I felt the game-change. Back in the rehearsal space, I tried to depress notes with my toes, to bend feedback without touching strings, to avoid "scales", to interfere with and otherwise try to get different sounds address another order of disorder.

 I entered "the game" a bit late in life-- but there were certain tectonic shifts in the aesthetics (and therefore the politics) of the younger musicians, when lower-case, onkyo (as quiet school) berlin reduction, london silence, the fresh and ascendant blooms --- it also seems clear that of these many players, he impressed a few of them who later wanted perhaps to get over this influence and establish new musical identities & explore another vocabulary, rather famously Taku Sugimoto's distancing from Derek after what appeared to have been some happy years. That Derek's playing might have become symbolic of the fast-paced, bristly and busy, grand-central-station-on-fire-alert school of super-chops improv sqwonk is however for my own sense of things almost un-noticeable, without severe import, because he was after all a master of great compressed silences that he fit into, that gapped, the space, between as on the album with Music Improvisation Company,1970 where I just had to start thinking differently again. Which brings me to the day that Derek died, 9 years ago, when I was in Berlin, on Christmas Day, when I was alone. And then suddenly more alone. More alone than ever because alone in Berlin. I read the news. I closed the web-browser. I went to the guitar on the table and picked up a violin bow, pressed record, and started a great throbbing drone chord that tapered and thinned as I bowed back and forth gently detuning until the sound ultimately dissipated into vapor. When I returned from my trance, I looked at the time-line and saw 59 minutes had elapsed. And I had had no idea what had happened.  Ritual prayer for his travels through the chiasmos of the bardo. Or any better opportunity.  

 Derek Bailey weighs in, at least for me, as one who plays the guitar both vertically and horizontally, all the time, deconstructing and re-membering, and his manipulations did involve almost every imaginable creative abuse (aka extended technique) of the instrument and about the only thing he didn't do a great deal of remains in the field of protracted buzz blanket click drone and Tammenesque processing, for which the guitar on the table seems quite logically placed. 

There are perhaps also, I must admit, many things that I imagined that Derek must have done first and better because, as I said, he's partly a myth and some the sounds I thought he made were something else entirely not his fault (maybe-- those squeaks, string rubbings, percussivities). Mythical beings have the capacity to do things most other people can't do but they also are the site for the projections of the polymorphic magma inside our psyche. So, every once in a while, when I'm playing, entering into some kind of deja vu (as when you look at you hands and see them acting almost without thought-control), I stop myself and I say, ah, that's something Derek would do. But I am never actually sure he did anything even remotely like that. In this sense, however, Derek was always playing with quanta, has always been right by my side. Like my fingers' fingers. Perhaps always will be. Until I'm too late, one day. 

Something about Martyna Poznańska

  Let's start out by listening to something... for example... click the link below

https://soundcloud.com/martinska/a-single-resounding-thump-announced-their-coincident-landing

     I don't know what's truly "important" in field recording, acousmatic composition or sound-art. I am aware of many opinions and many names, albums and tracks that are at my fingertips. I listen at times as if my life depended upon it and more often than not I find I'm a tough nut to crack: I find no reason not to like them all, criticism seems misguided, biased, lacking valid criteria, arbitrary, or not in my realm of faith. But a few works come alive almost within their own efforts and stride with an elastic & animal veracity across my ear drums slip into my mind and swim there. They are of themselves, as we are -- and seem friendly, like cities of sunken, phosphorescent stones. Environments reborn that recall the actual shaping orchestrations of experience's poetry in the making. The poet Louis Armand wrote "of the too persistent intersection of the outside and under the skin". And Stephen Ellis helps me get at the other side of it with: there is no meaning other than 'adjacency'. And yet one doesn't really get any closer. The work of Martyna Poznańska is both numinous and riddled with ambiguity. Heraclitus said "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself." Maybe there is something too familiar in the work of Martyna Poznańska to be considered elusive. A sound artist she verily is. From the Far East of  Poland she "defects" towards Berlin and the UK while her work resonates resolutely with the places she visits. Among them apparently Vietnam. Since I know Berlin and Poland through direct experience, I can imagine an isolate, rain-slant figure walking through ice-covered pavements recording the automobile reverberations, factory dins and chattering market swells. Ms. Poznańska seems to always be between worlds. Here we are: in and under-passage with foot-steps on the margins of Lethe or some Alexanderplatz and yet there's something like a synthetic siren song, unnerving and soothing, all at once. There is no real "nature' without "industry" and nature seems to be an outright factory with a tree running through the bowels. Sounds appear through drain-pipes or a grain-silo, like landscapes blurred behind frosted and foggy glass, with the clatter of spoons, broken things almost coming together again, flirt with statement, then disappear with a cat-step on a ghost shroud, all sent back to us as through amniotic fluid. Poland gives us this Tarkovskyan post-apocalyptic smile-scowl of wabi-sabi. This one here is a kind of spider-cipher skein-lyre whipped by enharmonic scirocco.

    state of origin hajnowkapoland by martyna poznańska on soundcloud

      Silence existing only by displacement of sounds cannot be heard knocking on immaterial doors like they do. She doesn't want to be interrupted while she runs about town between appointments. There is nothing and everything to hear in her works. I can listen or not listen with equal concern and yet I press the replay button with great ease. I'm impressed by what's not there. There's something about Martyna Poznańska. Maybe it's the glasses. They give the impression of huge, dilating eyes that permit her to visualize things others do not see. Maybe she doesn't. But I like to think she does. Certainly her sounds are listening. And more than worthy of contacting.

https://soundcloud.com/martinska/we-are-ourselves-gestures-of-making

   http://martinska.bandcamp.com/album/listening-east

 http://dropr.com/martynapoznanska/3534/exhaustikon

        http://martynapoznanska.com/

                              

 

Occupy Something Beautiful: One and 1/2 Years Later

        intenstified interactions with the site in Wilda
              an earth re-entry program            step by toe-hold upon
   axis mundi -- x & y skewed, inverted, held up to outer space, hovering just above grass --
sounds the earth plays as if i were the needle in it's groove, it's grove, it's grave -- opening to
  go on hands and knees grappling with amygdla and enigma (mole-hills,
             vast arrays, to escape insularity
         by echo-location of endless variety

the work within the realm of Vision reflected in the quivering hand rendering the 
Occupy Something Video Set

Occupy Something Beautiful and Absorb It, a personal political action

Occupy Something Beautiful and Absorb It (video link)

This is a video, a poor one, indeed, and a rich one all the same: document of a personal political action, a step I had to take to re-access how I am living. Several captures of bio-luminosity. photographic, somatic, pigments pressed into paper. The drawings I am currently working evolve from the process of using all sensory data to "depict" the synergy of the situation. The drawings are therefore neither wholly abstract nor strictly representational in the traditional visual sense of representation. I am extending into specific locations an aspect of visual art work begun in Berlin and Liege, Belgium and first presented as "Anatomies of the Invisible," in which I attempted to draw the inside of my own organism without breaking my own bodily surfaces. Just as the human body is a complex of systems that connect and involve one another with great subtlety, so I see in the forest also a deeply interwoven ecological system where the orders and appearances that seem accidental reveal themselves to be driven by intentions that are not my own but which can become part of my intentionality if I permit that to happen. The drawings therefore occasionally seem to represent recognizable species of animals and plants but they also generate mutations, mutant forms, forms in which one can catch glimpses of intermediary species that could have been or might yet be. In doing so, I am engaging in a different form of creativity, one involving the hidden processes of what I tend to call "the perfect mess".  More on thart later...

further imagery deriving from this action :

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10201202953220510.1073741832.1371170944&type=3

My work seems increasingly devoted to using the internet (somehow) to open up a means to local synergies by permitting access to reflection of minute, constant, observable structural change from a naturalist perspective described very effectively by Peter Warshall in his inspiring recent talk, just before his death. How late I am to come to this amazing person and what a pity he is already gone before I could thank him. The lecture is called Enchanted by the Sun.

Enchanted by the Sun

I pay particular attention to the relationship between perception and creation, reception and production.

I have published some thoughts and reflections about the idea of the microcosmic and macrocosmic systems inter-dependance in this my own weekly report video, starting at the 16 minute mark.

Saturday Night at the Villa dei Misteri, Week 4

Yaje, is the name I have recently learned for a kind of intelligence dwelling in the forest, access to which is permitted, I find, not only through drinking the Ayahuasca concoctions, but through localized meditation and observation: it is the place or space where you can start to feel the interconnections between all things, all events. I hope you get a chance to go there and meet with interested and innneresting unknowns.