Witch-Hazel, the album, is out now. Karolina Ossowska: violin; Jeff Gburek: percussion, prepared guitars, shortwave radios, firewood, ash, shovel

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/witch-hazel

 

In the better late than never category. And and just in time for the soulful holiday season of Halloween, All Soul's Day, Dia de los Muertos, transmigration of the butterflies. All treats and all tricks coyote. Two spooky organic tracks recorded late October and early November, 2023 at Dom Sztuk Kęszyca, mixed and mastered by Akashic Jeff & Akashic Records Studio in Lazarus, Poznan.

Karolina Ossowska: violin; 

Jeff Gburek: percussion, prepared guitars, shortwave radios, firewood, ash, shovel.

released October 26, 2024

 

Sept(ember) Sorties 2024: out on Akashic Records. Plus some notes on new methods.

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/sept-ember-sorties-2024

None-sense Opera is what I will call it. It's not noise, not merely musical soundcapery nor just anything rushing in to fill the 4/33 gap. My selections are operant, intuitive but their sense often only dawns on me later in the twilight when I become another kind of listener.  Mindful mindlessness comes to mind. Some mistakes and glitches remain to speak for the unknown necessities of being.

All these pieces were performed from Sept 9 thru 15 upon various instruments with the shifting ground of the sound stem composed of field recordings tapped this July and August (including hydrophones and VLF radio) in Czech Republic, Hungary & Romania. 

Check the album titles for instrumental details.

Schizophony, geophony, biophony, phonography in a laminal swirl, geothermal, lomographical, dragging geomagnetics VLF and radio pulses into the mess that organizes (composes) itself. I cannot perform anywhere but only draw the global signage of distances together (in this virtual here and now where you, the creative listener, exist also) to symbolize the taxis of a future interplanetary 

signalling cascade. If these words could mean what I'm trying to do with my work I would not need to execute this compression of files. So please take some time to give it all a listen.

Happy to report the discovery of this Roma Archive blog that ironically closed in 2019. Finally on my radar ;) This article on Auschwitz and the Testimony of Sinti and Roma by Karola Fings (in German, English and Romanes)

Happy to report the discovery of this Roma Archive blog that appears already archived as of 2019. Finally on my radar ;) Useful nevertheless. Many interesting articles and studies. Some excerpts pasted below. Read the full article after clicking on the link

 https://blog.romarchive.eu/auschwitz-and-the-testimony-of-the-sinti-and-roma-de-en/

Auschwitz and the Testimony of Sinti and Roma

Karola Fings

The historian Karola Fings recently wrote the book “Sinti and Roma. History of a minority” [Sinti and Roma. History of a Minority] published by C.H. Beck in the series “Knowledge”. She is the curator for Romarchive’s project “Voices of the Victims”, featuring early Sinti and Roma testimonials which document Nazi persecution in 20 European countries. In the following text, she describes the testimony of Sinti and Roma at the Auschwitz trial.

 

“There is nothing you can compare Auschwitz to. If you say 'the Hell of Auschwitz', that's no exaggeration. I think it's not enough for me to say that I’ve dreamt of Auschwitz a thousand times since then, of that horrible time where hunger and death ruled. I was a young girl when they brought me to Auschwitz. When I left the camp I was sick, and I am still sick today.”^[1]

Elisabeth Guttenberger, excerpt from an authorised version of an interview for the TV broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), 1962

Born in Stuttgart in 1926, Elisabeth Guttenberger, quoted above, was deported to the concentration and death camp in Auschwitz in March 1943. Like the survivor Max Friedrich, pictured together with his wife Grete in the photo, Ms Guttenberger was one of six witnesses of the Sinti and Roma minority whose testimony substantiated the Nazi crimes and the Holocaust in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt am Main, regarded by many as a historic milestone.

Every year on 27 January, when we remember the victims of National Socialism, the survivors of the concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau are frequently the centre of public interest. On 27 January 1945, the Red Army liberated several parts of the Auschwitz camp where more than one million people, most of them Jewish, were murdered. In 1996, the German Federal President Roman Herzog declared 27 January as the day of commemoration for all victims of the Nazi regime, and in 2005, the United Nations officially designed it as the “International Holocaust Remembrance Day”. Today, there are only a few living survivors who can still testify to the crimes that were committed there. But their voices are heard, their stories are appreciated, and they themselves now receive attention and empathy.

But this wasn’t the case for many decades – and particularly so for the Sinti and Roma survivors of Nazi persecution. After 1945, the Federal Republic of Germany did not recognise their suffering as “racially motivated” persecution. Instead, the former perpetrators read to convince the courts that members of this minority were “inferior” or alleged “spies” who were deported for “crime-preventative” reasons. This position was largely accepted by the general public which meant that most of the crimes and their perpetrators went unpunished. The survivors and their relatives continued to suffer discrimination, received no acknowledgement of their anguish, and as a result, many of them were denied compensation.

The civil rights movements of the Sinti und Roma, which have been active in Germany and on the international stage since the 1970s, finally compelled the German government to acknowledge the genocide committed against the minority. The Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism, which officially opened in Berlin in 2012, is the most visible result of this long struggle for recognition. Throughout the debate, the testimony of survivors played a large role. Even among many of the Sinti and Roma survivors, it wasn’t until the TV series “Holocaust” aired in 1979 that they recalled their own suffering from Nazi persecution, which they had suppressed in order to get on with their lives. Against the background of this growing historical awareness of the Holocaust in the majority society, and consequently, the fate of the “forgotten victims”, a grosslong withfied activities of the civil rights movements to document the history of persecution, a slew of reports, documentaries, biographies and autobiographies were published starting in the 1980s w have been very .^[2]

All the more remarkable are the early testimonies by Sinti and Roma, presented in a social atmosphere of rejection and denial of the crimes. It is almost impossible to imagine what it meant for the victims to raise their voices against this wall of silence. The Auschwitz trial was one of the few legal proceedings in Germany, in which Nazi crimes against the Sinti and Roma were litigated – albeit only marginally.^[3] The trial itself came about thanks to the commitment of the Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer who – facing heavy resistance in Frankfurt am Main and to an extent never seen before– initiated criminal .in crimes committed in Auschwitz.^[4] On 7 October 1963, the Frankfurt District Court began proceedings against 22 accused individuals which, following testimony from 360 witnesses, concluded with the announcement of the verdicts on 20 August 1965. Most of the accused were sentenced to life imprisonment or shorter prison terms for having committed murder or abetting joint murder. There were also three acquittals.Among the accused were six former SS officers who were also implicated in murdering the Sinti and Roma. Starting in March 1943, some 23,000 men, women and children were rounded up in the German empire, Austria and the German-occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and the Netherlands, and deported to a special section of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. The conditions in the camp were so horrendous that within a matter of months, most of them died of hunger, illness or violent crimes.

“The worst thing,” according to Elisabeth Guttenberger in her report, “what the hunger. The hygienic conditions were undebatable. There was hardly any soap or possibilities to wash up. (...) The children died first. Day and night, they cried for bread; soon they all starved to death. (...) In our work brigade we had to do everything in double time. To SS Block Leader rode a bicycle alongside us. If a woman collapsed because she was too weak, he would beat her with a baton. Many died as a result of this physical abuse. (...) The SS Camp Doctor, who was in charge of the Gypsy camp, was named Dr Mengele. He was one of the most dreaded camp doctors at Auschwitz. In addition to everything the SS doctors were guilty of at Auschwitz, he carried out experiments on the handicapped and twins. He also used my cousins, who were twins, as “guinea pigs”. (...) I lost about 30 relatives in Auschwitz. My siblings and my father literally starved to death within the first few months. My youngest brother was 13 years old. He had to carry stones until he had been reduced to a mere skeleton. So He starved to death. And finally, my mother starved to death.”^[5]

The only ones who had a chance of surviving were those who were transferred to other camps to do forced labour. Among them was Elisabeth Guttenberger, who was transported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp on 1 August 1944, and then sent further to a subcamp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The remaining 3,000 or so Sinti and Roma were murdered in the gas chambers at Birkenau in the night of 2 to 3 August 1944.

Reviews of my "Four Inexplicable Cuts" album and "The Art of Prepared Guitar Vol. One" -- by Vasco Viviani, translated by myself into English

  

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/four-inexplicable-cuts-two-new-poems-aloud-in-the-field

Review of my "Four Inexplicable Cuts" album by Vasco Viviani Viviani, here translated from Italian into English with some sound advice from Ilaria Boffa
    

"Jeff Gburek is an expanded guitarist, in the sense that in addition to plucking the instrument, his sound vision includes field recordings, acoustic compositions, electronics, poetry, organic objects and much more. He also studies Balinese and Javanese gamelan, as well as theories from Harry Partch and Iannis Xenakis. It is therefore not surprising that the discovery of some compositions recorded in the field during trips between Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria turn out to be the most exciting thing you can hear in this sweet spring. Wandering and free sound, full of nature, enzymes and fertilizers. The "field" here is not the mere environment, but the dense composition of thriving soil, including flights of insects and croaking that he manages to compress into an exhaustive corpus of sound. The strings of his instruments are combined with the trills and the interventions of human voices, for an undulating portrait of a luxuriant nature in constant movement and in which the human being is but a small element. In the third inexplicable cut, the vision seems to rise aerial and more elegiac, to illustrate a microcosm united with the celestial and cosmic vault. In the fourth movement instead we return to the earth, the tolling of the guitar seems to convey a vision of the field, a sort of contemplative communion of the environment, with melodies painting a picture of placidly harmonious buzz. And as coda, two western-ish sound poems, wide spaces, spread sounds.
   Jeff Gburek's is a story to be followed carefully, or, at least, to be accompanied for a part of the journey on the field."

That review nin the original Italian : https://www.sodapop.it/phnx/jeff-gburek-four-inexplicable-cuts-two-new-poems-aloud-in-the-field-akashic-2023/

 

Review of The Art of Prepared Guitar Volume One by Vasco Viviani, translated by google (I will get around to fixing the weirdities (statements whose intention I could not decipher well enough to translate myself) later, maybe --

 

 https://ramblerecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-art-of-prepared-guitar-volume-one

   

"After the recent discovery of Four Inexplicable Cuts & Two New Poems Aloud In The Field we return to talk about Jeff Gburek. Globetrotting guitarist who, in this collection of sounds for the Australian Ramble Records (discovered this time thanks to the jewel Davide Cedolin) offers us a helping of his at times searing compositions for prepared guitar. A guitar prepared with strong ties to its body and its history, remaining the main actor of the tracks, transfigured without disappearing.
    Of course, she (the guitar?) is abused but the simulation it is recognizable and still breathes, even if she seems drunk and in orbit (Toggled Modular Gapped Slides). Not everything flows, indeed, sometimes the jam is part of the game and is part of the preparation of the guitar, blocked and forced in disconnected movements. The bravi alternate between sketches of a couple of minutes scarce or very wide drafts ranging from eight to eleven minutes, but the whole disc, more than a collection of songs, should be read as a palette of sketches and attempts, spiluccando here and there. Jeff's hands are always sharp and manage to hit, engage and sometimes distort what we would expect to hear, but they do so leaving us with the image of being right in that room, light wood, in the outback, some snake around and a rocking chair.
    Circular, ghostly sounds, where you can hear the echoes of the most stripped down Bill Orcutt or the driest Tom Carter. Sounds that rarely bend to roundness but that keep their path tied like bundles of nerves at low intensity. Following the art of Jeff Gburek is like turning into a small fly for an hour: you turn among the buzzes, discovering new caves, surprising yourself and dodging the blows waiting for the second volume.

https://www.sodapop.it/phnx/jeff-gburek-the-art-of-prepared-guitar-volume-one-ramble-2023/

 

Blues on the Burgas Bay, Bulgaria, August 2023

more photos of the bay below in link

    As some of you may have heard already: on August 8, in the wee hours, near Burgas, Bulgaria, while camping on the bay giving onto the Black Sea, someone broke into our old Volvo wagon via the rear passenger window and stole my field recording kit & tools suitcase, among other things. Inside the suitcase they grabbed was the Zoom H6 (a constant companion since 2015), the new hydrophone, two self-built piezo contact plate microphones, that Tecsun PL-600 shortwave radio, numerous cables and many home-made patches, various tools, walkie talkies and worst of all, the irreplaceable SD cards with the last few days and nights of recordings (about which I was very excited) and another SD card, recordings from 2021 from Romania, Poland & Bulgaria, some of which had not been archived yet). The experience I'd been contemplating of this beautiful Black Sea coast was primordial and exhilarating: rugged beaches, some still heaped with millions of tiny shells (future sands from former homes), with visible shoals and sand-bars, views of the ports, cormorant perches, foxes calling to each other in the scrub at night, a peninsula obviously once inhabited in Homeric or earlier times jutting out, steep cliffs falling off. I had long and fruitful recording sessions and walks along winding paths of wind-blown wild grass. I had hoped to bring listeners closer to these shores and into the electromagnetic pulsations of the ionosphere full of resonance and Perseid meteor showers.... 

 I had started to snore most likely just when the glass shattered, the sound of breaking plastic glass masked and blended with the crashing, distantly lulling Black Sea waves. Nothing short of a miracle will replace the recordings but a little help from friends can go a long way towards recouping I and Karolina's expenses in replacing the lost gear and getting our home recording studio back in order and get us back in the field again. Our automobile insurance doesn't cover theft. In fact, the insurance company wouldn't even pay for the glass replacement. So the greater loss is the gear, the clothes, the tools, some medicines and the whole day spent enjoying the inside of a Bulgarian police station. 

 Donations to help us recover the gear can be made to my paypal account jeff.gburek@gmail.com or if you would prefer another means of support message us directly. Many thanks to our Bulgarian friends Den Stefanova and Rozaliya Mitrova who reposted here my all points bulletin days after the theft.

 I would like to thank Nina Rholfs, Charles Whittaker, Bob Bellerue, Kenneth Bradburd for their contributions to the recovery campaign. And thanks to all who shared the post and offered condolences.

photo sets from Burgas Bay

 https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=jeff.gburek&set=a.10231318870819628

 

 https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=jeff.gburek&set=a.10231307825263496

 

 

 

 

Tracks inside the Sonic Footprint. Sound Art with Ecological Perspectives. An interview with Marta Zapparoli. (English and Italian)

 

      Marta Zapparoli, practices a living art form that is open-ended, interactive, connected with the earth, it's electro-magnetic fields and evolving elements. Among sound artists, a rare few, if any others, share the same diversity, polymathic instrincts and pure curiosity. Her field is our actuality: vibration, energy, communications networks, invisible forces of nature, order, chaos and pollution. Through multiple sound media such as shortwave radio wave resonance, natural and urbanistic field recording, tape machines, self-designed antennae, she has advanced her art of listening and sharing to eventually attempt translation of the inaudible pulsations of solar plasma into a sensual experience as in her most recent performance work on the Northern Lights entitled "Interdimensional Generated Space".

https://dissipatio.bandcamp.com/album/interdimensional-generated-space

      Marta Zapparoli's work is down to earth and yet "up in the air", in the ionosphere: an address to the epoch wherein the "connectivity" of virtual sociality has created a web of 5G satellites, mind-cancelling and bird- & bee-disturbing technologies. On the fringes of the old acoustic ecology she helps keep me focused on the great sense of trying to listen across the gap between the current biosphere and the ancient chthonian, primordial forces, a re-evaluation and re-formation of consciousness of the Gaian planetary spheres suggested by Lyn Margulis as a symbiogenesis.

I met Marta in Berlin and we continued the interview via email.

 

-What was the first sound you ever heard that was an omen of the path you are on now in your sound art?

Honestly, there were many sounds that somehow directed me onto my path in sound art. From a young age I was a careful listener of environmental sounds surrounding me, both in nature and cities. I became more involved with sound when I moved to live in a city, as a sonic observer, especially in listening closely to the industrial noises around of me. After a while, I became obsessed with how to deconstruct the noise cloud into small definite sound particles, and how to record it, and to use the microscopic parts that made up the overall noise in a constructive and artistic way. Probably the industrial sounds of the city, heard and consequently recorded in macroscopic detail, were a great stimulus for me to enter the world of sound art, then using them in visionary and imaginative ways during my first live performances.

Qual è stato il primo suono che hai mai sentito che sembrava essere un presagio del nostro attuale percorso nell'arte sonore?

Onestamente , ci sono stati molti suoni che mi hanno indirizzato sulla strada dell'arte sonora. Fin da giovane, sono stata un'ascoltatore attento dei suoni dell'ambiente che mi circondava, sia in natura che nella citta'. Quando mi sono spostata a vivere in citta', sono stata catturata profondamente dal rumore industriale che mi circondava, e stava diventando un'ossessione l'idea di come come scarnificare i rumori in piccole particelle sonore definite, e come registrare, e usare queste microscopiche parti che componevano il rumore generale in modo costruttivo e artistico. Probabilmente i suoni industriali della citta', ascoltati e di conseguenza registrati in modo macroscopico e dettagliato, sono stati un grande stimolo per me per entrare nel mondo dell'arte sonora, usandoli poi in maniera visionaria e fantasiosa.

 

-What was your very first field recording? What equipment did you use?

My first field recordings were made using the radio receiver, recording onto cassette tape the music and noises in the short wave radio frequencies, using the radio of my father. I basically grew up with a small tape recorder and radio, so this was my first approach to field recording.

Le mie prime registrazioni le ho fatte usando la radio, registravo su registratore a cassetta la musica e il rumore delle stazioni, sintonizzando nelle frequenze radiofoniche a onda corta con la radio del mio papa. Sono cresciuta fondalmentalmente con un piccolo registratore a cassette e la radio, questo e' stato il mio primo approccio con i field recordings.

      -How did you get involved with VLF (Very Low Frequency) or Natural Radio listening and recording? Can you briefly tell us in simple terms what this is?

Working for some years with self-made field recordings of vibrational sounds, industrial places, machinery, cities, acoustic ecology, underwater, underground, abandoned places, among others, I slowly grew more interested in what the environment is hiding under the multicolored layers of acoustical noises and sounds. I asked my self: what am I NOT able to hear in a chaotic city ? Or on the top of a mountain or in a desert and in many other places around the world ? After some time of research, I started to experiment with a wide range of antennas and radio receivers, during out-door recordings, to hunt and receive the invisible web laying under the acoustic environment.

Also, in a dramatic and sad moment of my life, when my father passed away, I started to grow more obsessive about energies and the inaudible. Reflecting on the connection of our life with the universe, I started to explore and research in the vast field of radio astronomy.

Since then, I'm focusing my artistic work and research on the use of self-produced recordings of electromagnetic radiations coming from nature (our atmosphere and from outer space), including also radio wave communication, wireless, and electro-smog coming from our technological world.

I'm very fascinated by the origin of Natural Radio phenomena (VLF), I have done a lot of research on this -- radio, is also "natural" and was heard even before was invented, it has been always there from the beginning of the origin of our planet.

Natural Radio (VLF) are fundamentally electromagnetic emissions which originate from natural phenomena from the atmosphere and the outer space such as thunderstorm, weather phenomena, Northern Lights , solar wind and other events.

Lavorando per alcuni anni con i field recordings, specificatamente sui suoni vibrazionali, luoghi industriali, macchinari, città, ecologia acustica, registrazioni sottomarine, sotterrane, luoghi abbandonati, etc. mi sono lentamente interessata a ciò che l'ambiente nasconde sotto gli strati multicolori di rumori e suoni acustici. Mi sono chiesta: cosa NON posso sentire in una città caotica, in cima a una montagna, in un deserto e in molti altri luoghi del mondo?

Dopo qualche tempo di ricerca, ho iniziato a sperimentare con una vasta gamma di antenne e ricevitori radio durante le registrazioni all'aperto, per ricercre e per ricevere la rete invisibile che si cela sotto l'ambiente acustico.

Oltre tutto, in un momento drammatico e triste della mia vita, quando è venuto a mancare mio padre, sono diventata piu osessiva riguardo le energie e l' impercettibile. Riflettendo molto sulla connessione della nostra vita con l'Universo, ho iniziato a esplorare il vasto campo della radioastronomia.

Da allora, sto concentrando il mio lavoro artistico e la mia ricerca sull'uso di registrazioni autoprodotte di radiazioni elettromagnetiche provenienti dalla natura ( dll'atmosfera e dall'universo), comprese le comunicazioni a onde radio, wireless, e i campi elettromagnetici (EMF) provenienti dal nostro mondo tecnologico.

Sono molto affascinata dall'origine dei fenomeni radiofonici naturali (VLF) e ho fatto molte ricerche al riguardo - la radio, anch'essa "naturale", è stata ascoltata prima che fosse inventata, è sempre stata presente fin dall'origine del nostro pianeta.

Le radio naturali (VLF) sono fondamentalmente emissioni elettromagnetiche che provengono da fenomeni naturali dell'atmosfera e dello spazio esterno, come i temporali, i fenomeni atmosferici, l'aurora boreale, il vento solare e altri eventi.

        -Has your perception of the shape of the earth changed since you began your research as a recordist?

Of course my perception it has changed ! This is unavoidable!!

Being a sound artist, recording environmental sounds, I have developed more awareness of climate events, atmospheric movements, expansion, amplitude, instability, time and mutation - I discovered how microscopical ecosystems can trigger huge events. All these realizations changed my perception of the earth. Its shape is in constant transformation.

Certo che la mia percezione e' cambiata! Questo e' inevitabile !

Essendo un artista del suono che registra suoni ambientali, ho sviluppato una maggiore consapevolezza degli eventi climatici, dei movimenti atmosferici, dell'espansione, dell'ampiezza, dell'instabilità, del tempo e della mutazione - ho scoperto come ecosistemi microscopici possano innescare eventi enormi. Tutte queste consapevolezze hanno cambiato molto la mia percezione della Terra. La sua forma è in costante trasformazione.

-Did you become aware of ecological challenges of climate change while in the process or did any ecological sensibility or sensitivity draw you into recording or was it just rather everything happening all together at once?

The process of recordings, guided me towards a path of awareness of the ecological challenge of climate change. At the beginning of my career I recorded more often the noisy and chaotic industrial cites (I was living in cities most of the time and interested to listen and to extrapolate details from the global noise field with different microphones and experimental

techniques) while at the same time I was also fascinated by the natural rural environment which looked so silent but instead could be very loud and chaotic and unpredictable too. And so I recorded a lot of nature too. It was somehow a parallel process. The more I grew aware of the technological, the more I got interested and fascinated with how the natural world is so independent and malleable, strong, wild and unpredictable, and how everything in it adapts, mutates, in a polluted environment, in order to survive.

Il processo di registrazione mi ha guidato verso un percorso di consapevolezza della sfida ecologica del cambiamento climatico. All'inizio della mia carriera ho registrato più spesso le rumorose e caotiche città industriali (vivevo in città per la maggior parte del tempo e mi interessava ascoltare ed estrapolare dettagli nel rumore globale con diversi microfoni e tecniche sperimentali), ma allo stesso tempo ero anche affascinata dall'ambiente naturale rurale che sembrava così silenzioso ma invece poteva essere molto rumoroso, caotico e imprevedibile, e così ho registrato anche molta natura. È stato in qualche modo un processo parallelo. Più ero consapevole del mondo tecnologico e più mi interessava e mi affascinava come il mondo naturale fosse così indipendente e malleabile, forte, selvaggio e imprevedibile, e come si adattasse, mutasse, in un ambiente inquinato per sopravvivere.

-You are based in Berlin. When did you first arrive there? How has living there changed your process? Has Berlin itself changed in your view?

I arrived in Berlin in 2007 because I won an Italian competition to realize an audio portrait of the city in the length of time of four months. At the time, I wanted to leave my country anyway, due to the lack of attention offered to women sound artists & noise-experimental musicians.

Berlin was an open door to freedom and possibilities. I had more possibilities and time to focus on my working process, to reflect, research, experiment more. Meeting people from all over the world, experimenting and learning in workshops, exchanging with other musicians knowledge and information, collaborating with ensembles and groups, was an important challenge to grow as an artist and as a person.

In the past 10 years, Berlin changed very much in negative and positive ways, but also my relation-feelings "in" and "with" the city changed. It is a mixture of things together that evolved in multiple layers. Despite the negative side of gentrification, pollution, inflation, the expensive of living costs etc... aspects which of course are known all over the world, still, Berlin is an incredible, excited, multicolored city with good opportunities, strong culture, great vibes, and grant possibilities to support artistic works.

For most artists, it is an incredible privilege to live here and we should never forget this and to work hard to make good use of it.

  Sono arrivata a Berlino nel 2007 perché ho vinto un concorso italiano per realizzare un ritratto sonoro della città, nel periodo di quattro mesi. All'epoca, volevo comunque lasciare il mio paese, a causa della mancanza di attenzione nei confronti delle donne artiste sonore, musiciste noise-sperimentale. Berlino era come una porta aperta di libertà e possibilità.

Avevo più possibilità e tempo per concentrarmi sul mio processo di lavoro, per riflettere, ricercare, sperimentare sempre di piu'. Incontrare persone da tutto il mondo, sperimentare e imparare nei workshop, scambiare conoscenze e informazioni con altri musicisti - artisti, collaborare con ensemble e gruppi, è stata una sfida importante per crescere come artista e come persona.

Negli ultimi 10 anni Berlino è cambiata molto, in negativo e in positivo, ma anche il mio rapporto con la città è cambiato. E' una miscela di cose che si sono evolute a più livelli. Nonostante gli aspetti negativi, tra i quali la gentrificazione, l'inquinamento, l'inflazione, l'aumento del costo della vita, ecc.... che ovviamente si riflettono in tutto il mondo; Berlino è ancora un'incredibile eccitante città multicolore , con buone opportunità, una forte cultura, grandi vibrazioni, con possibilità di sostenere progetti artistici.

Per la maggior parte degli artisti, è un incredibile privilegio vivere qui, e non dovremmo mai dimenticarlo, e lavorare duro per farne buon uso.

-Would you like to travel in outer space?

If it could be physically and emotionally possible, I have a dream-desire to sit on the furnaces of a comet and to navigate in the outer space to feel the transcendental connection with the universe; then, to enter in a black hole to feel the speed limit of the cosmos.

But, in general, I travel in outer space all the time when I perform live with my vortex of noises, energies and radio waves.

Se fosse fisicamente ed emotivamente possibile, ho un sogno-desiderio di sedermi sulle fornaci di una cometa e di navigare nello Spazio per sentire la connessione trascendentale con l'Universo - poi, di entrare in un buco nero per sentire il limite di velocità del cosmo.

Ma in generale, viaggio sempre nello Spazio quando mi esibisco dal vivo con il mio vortice di rumori, energie e onde radio.

Please visit Marta's website for further information.

https://martazapparoli.klingt.org/

 

 

Amanita Muscaria as a Medium of Gut Biome Reflection: Notes on This with a Healthy Dose of That

image by unknown artist

    Neutrality is not negativity. It only appears so when it doesn't get counted in the vote. And it only appears so when we want to weaponize neutrality. This is how we treat quantum mechanics in our daily life: as something that doesn't matter, doesn't fit with the results until decisions have been made and sides have been taken. But the ground state underlies all conditions, all states of matter and potentiates all observations, all interventions. Things themselves, when satisfied, self-consistent, enjoy being at rest. All struggles are enjoined to regain this self-consistency, homeostasis, using the laws of entropy to go contrary to itself for a shorter or longer period of time. The drama of Sisy-phusis' labor is not human in scale but cosmological. It is reduced to the simplest action merely to teach the children of ancient Greek civilization a fundamental idea about energy. It further involves, as already hinted, Chronos, time, that cut from space, the dimensional reduction in which we dwell. It demands the development of cyclical process. At the root of time is this broken, segmented periodicity. The serpent of the night. Our moons our suns our zodiac now our megagalactic clusters. Churning in our guts and minds as if one.

    Written as a reply to a comment I read in the Amanita Muscaria group on FB. Multiple ideas come to mind. As always, we should stop thinking, but cannot but... Reason can choose to not exist. But it's a choice of not choosing (familiar paradox). By recognizing itself as generating illusions reason can stop creating them, stop believing one is more significant than any other, can start deconstructing the language of thought like you have already begun doing above. Mind and matter maybe coextensive and therefore infinite. As an old poem said the mind mirror of matter moves into itself backwards. What I've liked most about Amanita experiences is that it brings about a sense of connectivity. So there is no sense of being in a prison (gnostic matter) but it's rather an experience of networks like the wood wide web or the mycelial understory or the gente de yage (the spirits of the rainforest plants and animals in some of the Ayahuasca curandero/a traditions.) Amanita seems to tell me wordlessly it is not a trap and that's because there is no final border. If there is a border it can be penetrated, gotten through, worked upon or worked with.

 When reason is being reasonable it opts for diversity because choosing for less than a number of things is logically impossible if one sticks to the idea of what counts. That might seem like a play on words, and it is, but with a purpose. One may contain all things but unity is a process in which all things are interactive. This is what the Gaia concept offers as a remedy to the mind matter dilemma. In other theories matter is merely energy or information seeking translation and these do not stand in opposition as they do in dualistic systems

 In other thought systems (philosophies) there is often detected a harsh definition, a hard line, between what is living and so-called inanimate matter. The Gaian concept introduces us as a mixed bag of both in some kind of infinite food chain or eating chain of things metabolizing. Parallel universe theories developed to explain how quantum mechanics actually works suggest that more than two contrary states can exist simultaneously in the absolute universe if infinite probabilistic combinatorics. In the words of Wolf, matter is constantly being reborn as spirit and the spiritual matters composing the mind are eventually unable to keep the body from being reborn as matter without particular thoughts or without thoughts we particularly think.

 The Amanita process is dovetailing a lot of concerns. It's truly a revelation of relatedness and brings one to see more of what is essential and necessary inside all things. In the forest, there is nothing really there by chance but it all seems like a jumble, random, senseless, when taken from the human pov. Now a lot of scientists would say that is true without needing to get so spiritually excited about it. I find the recognition however heartening because it makes me rethink my whole life configuration in a similar way. I am no longer thinking my life is nearly as fucked up as I thought it was a few years ago. Microdosing the amanita has something to do with the mood stabilization but it's the quality of that which matters the most. I was allowed to see how I got to Amanita through the forest. Reading about forest, mycology and ecological interdependence made the idea of consciousness being a result of all these processes seem much more believable since the mind and body literally find in nature that which supports them fundamentally, contrary to the industrial and classic Western idea that nature is an enemy and matter being slow, stupid, lacking intelligence.

 

On the use of pscyhedelic states and how to achieve them. In reply to Thibault Delfiere

 I tried to follow this in the translation and with my latin languages background making guesses into gaps of significance. I did get the idea that you mentioned three kinds of drugs and that the third category, the psychotopics/psyhedelic being the one you had the least experience or knowledge about and yet they (this class of mind altering substance) seem to be the drugs you believe create the most bizarre combinations of imagery. The short answer to why strange imagery accompanies these experiences is because they expand the onieric temporality of the brain's processing and permit one to dream consciously... what's this all about? What is lucidity in dream space?

 (Pupil dilation changes amount and exposure time of photonic energy, causing new visual temporal processing dynamics). 

Various visual hallucinations are often the result of slowed redistribution of serotonin in the synapses accentuated by the dilation of the pupils allowing more reflective light into the apertures. This may seem trifling because the speed difference between photons relative to the curvature of space might seem negligible on the macro scale, not to mention nil on the cosmic scale, but on the subjective plane, this re-adjustment of the framing of perception is huge enough to cause wonder and reflection. 

 Double or trip-le or quadruple takes. It causes you to see more of what is there to be seen and because it works on phenomenological feedback loop, it's related absolutely to the actuality of becoming rather than distortion of it. It merely shows the relativity of the various distortions (reductions) we call "perception". All of our perceptions in fact are selected focus spaces, screened or filtered versions of the absolute information network that is the ultimate reality beyond our culturally manufactured limits.

The great problem with illegal substances is that one speaks of them publically these days through a veil of self-censorship (although the internet provides you with numerous forums to discuss this kind of "kink" and you can absorb details without ingesting any of them, retaining your virtual virginity, so to speak. For example, I've never ingested any ayahuasca potions but after 10 years of studying the topic I'm pretty sure I understand what can happen if I would take it and as a result I have never sought to do it outside ceremonial conditions in the natural tropical rainsforest ennvironement where the spirits of thos medicinal concotions dwell. I am pretty sure those who drink ayhuasca outside this context are not getting the ayahuasca experience. They get some kind of re-organization of mental space certainly but context is everything. Normalizing data and urbanity rushes back in. For those who don't believe in nature spirits, they are just sampling another recreational adult knock-out beverage the post-modern market place offers maybe. I mean to say they might also have profound experiences and revelations but these same revelations or experience could be obtained through sythesized pharmacueticall created intelligently. Those who believe that the trees, fungi, forest animals and waters living in symbiosis are part of the mixture will want to meet face to face with the source.

    Ample information is available about the way consciousness is affected by all pyschotropics. We are in a heyday of open communications in the West where mostly we can still talk about things that are illegal if we do so in an intelligent, reasonable and scientific manner. The impact of mind altering substance on art is an old and still controversial one. 

    My own view is that art really is a form of symbol making that can include or ignore certain sets of phenomenological data or imagery. Deep art that delves into archetypal forms will occasionally take a more visceral or somatic than mental path and if the way to the image is through the body anthropomorphic and messy imagery of bodily process may be more understandable to the person under the influence. Both creator and viewer. When the experience is more mental or intellectual, the imagery tends to be tentacular, branching, associated with vibration, aura, multiple images, trails, wires, diagrams, sacred geometry: establishing patterns of connectivity. Perhaps this division of spheres follows bicameral, left/right brains specializations (These are neural binding geometries based on serotonin affinities of psychoactive alkaloids.). 

No matter what "causes" or "results", in either case, the issue is how intelligently our mind continues, carries on, give vent to our relation of & to ourselves and the environment and the cosmos. This is what allows us to see in art even prehistorically the vehicle that carries many stages of the evolution of self consciousness from animist religions to science. 

Mind altering substances have always been ingested. The urge to merge and combine.

It's in the food or it is the food. In some cultures certain foods were taboo except as medicines. The medicinal foods had to be given in microdoses. The priest (a witch, in th west, mostly) was the first doctor. You probably know this. Yet what you don't know about psychedelics is that they provide mental pathways and create new ways of perceiving interiority. Meditation practices and isometric exercise can also bring about these mental states. Just do it. My personal question at the moment is why should we make art if we already feel good and perfect about our consciousness? The answer can be as different as every person is different. Maybe art is simply the art of being different. Of being the differand as Deleuze put it. 

 

Recontre avec T.D. contd

Yes, you most clearly show that you don't understand psychedelics because you cling to the idea that there is dependence involved. I think you are able to understand but maybe you do not try or don't want to try. Maybe it is more convenient to have a behaviour related to dope and dopes who use dope which you can compare and contrast your own more heroic behavior as a singularity artist.

In any case, I think you are correct to say you don't need any drugs. But this also missed the point: people don't take psychedelics out of need but instead out of desire, will, or as a sacrament. It is like any decision to make a painting or sculpture or performance. It is to engage consciousness to take a challenge and engage with the material that is one's own self. 

Regarding darkness it is the supreme challenge because it is without externalized media. We speak here of enlarging sensibilities not about reducing them. But we speak here also about removing obstacles and rigid binaries. We can experience light also. Light as darkness is one of the most generative discoveries of the psychonaut. Psychonauts are concerned with living experiences and perhaps little or not at all concerned with leaving traces although nothing is forbidden and everything permitted. In this sense they are also wilful and assert themselves as you might put it. I think the biggest difference we explore here is the one concerning externalization. I know you make art and do performances. I also know well and feel deeply your frustrations since I share the sense of not being able to set up performances, exhibitions. I too lack recognition for my endeavors. Yet the interesting aspect of the spiritual path is that it alone allows one finally say fuck off to society and find some peace and freedom -- of mind mainly -- but who knows -- the world and the mind may be more intricately interwoven than we can tell. Freedom is just a process of by-passing or shrinking one's self to fit through gaps in the system that enslaves.   I hope you accept my statements as a friendly contrarian viewpoint and not as any attack. I respect and admire your tenacity in process. Good morning!