The Many & True Approaches, Baltic Ozones 1 & 2 and notes about process and a new poem or two on the eve of a Ceasefire

          "I felt that I had been broken /like a diamond and that nothing of light remained of me" 

                       -- Mahmoud Darwish 

 

 

  https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/the-many-true-approaches

 originally I had the title as "all manner of potential approaches" -- perhaps for the album title -- then something shifted -- out of the unseen there came a suggestion of an alternative --

   Created in the field on January 14th using bespoke VLF radio receivers, Tecsun multiband radio, Baofeng transciever & Hack RF 4M keyed with Cubic SDR software which adds a special range of articulation in bandwidth. Sources are radio carrier waves, so there's instability, unpredictability into the mix, keeps the improvisation on the go. The ensemble en suite. Hopefully you are listening already.

After coming back from the work in the field at Lake Rusalka, the poem emerged and I had a sudden flash of wonder whether or not it could be the first poem ever to reference field recordings or the kind of devices I use while getting out into bringing the plasmosphere into ear-shot... here it goes...

Space weather recording

More pingy than swoop

Snow crunch in headphones

Better mind my step

Through my ears

Cupped in these containers

Muffling the nor'wester

As the falsely positive snow

Starts to tinkle as rain

On partially iced lake

Ionosphere ticks

Variable molecular clocks

In the overall ageless sky

Still lustrous grey hinged

Layers overlapping into horizon

Red branched bush

I forgot to Google lens

Also forgot y-splitter cable

So onto VLF coms reciever

One unusual squiggly beacon

Squiggly signal striate like bacon

Funny how language works

Out accidental parallels

Or simply occult coherencies

Remain objectively insignificant

And could this wind up a poem

I wonder why there are no limits

Yet, aye, the plasmosphere

Begs to differ gasseously

Exigous in patches

This caul and veil of interlacing

atoms sharing electrons like

Soldiers do cigarettes in trenches

In the old movies anyway

This crocheted vaporous array

Shielding life from cindering sun

And galactic ultra wind

A frail protective veil in effect

Reminds me my own fingers

Are beginning to numb

Holding onto these dear

Devices of sound induction

Nakedly withdrawn

Back into gloves

Packing up quickly

Trudging over frozen mud

Back to bus stop

And boom, dynamite perhaps

Road works, blast in earth

Disturbance and chainsaws

Of kurwa cursing loggers

I wish they'd assume their role

As sacred functionaries, nurses,

As executioners of the woods

And hack more solemnly

 

 

Attempting to do inner environmentalism, I guess. 

Environ-mental-ism. 

 Onward to the Baltic coast, near Koszalin -- a village area called Łazy, to be more precise, where I was able to record some relatively complex configurations of microphones on the shores on a sunny but not overly blustery day. As always, when on location, I do some radio captures, so this first compostion brings the seas and the ether waves into some equilibrium-seeking drama... Some location photos to follow and intercalate with the other track links

 

https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/baltic-ozones-i

 

 

 

 

 

Quick note from my Facebook post:

 Field recordings of the Baltic coast, radio from Marine UHF, Shortwave (all recorded coastally on Dec 24/25, 2024) and synthesizer added early today during the live mix. This edition in memory of Miguel A. Garcia, who's recent passing haunts my listening at this time.

 

 

 

 

 https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/baltic-ozones-2-ripples

 

It finished itself quickly today. Enjoy Baltic Ozones part 2 aka Ripples

 

 

 

 

 "Shall I believe in ripples as well as the sea? --that is, the ripplehood of ripples?  Let me explain why life is but a ripple or ripples of one

unrippled and unrippleable essence"  -- Jack Kerouac

On New Year's Eve fulcrum swing I and Karolina recorded our first ever electro-noise tracks and some minimal techno miniatures that will go up as an album somewhere soon. I'll keep you posted. I will leave you, whoever has gotten this far, with Tajallih, a work I realized for no-input EQ pedal and synthesizer as a kind of sallah looking toward the ceasefire horizon in Gaza. The acrylic painting came just before by a day.  https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/tajalli

 

 

 

 

Heliopathy by Jeff Gburek available for pre-order via Post-Orientalism label (Teheran/Berlin), Album Notes, Further musings----on the process of foraging in the ether or the plasmosphere and beyond while grounded into the earth ---

 

    

     https://postorientalism.bandcamp.com/album/heliopathy

 

 Album Notes

Heliopathy — the feeling of — or for — helios, our local star: a yellow dwarf, although it's funny to call this ball of super fire — so huge — a dwarf, & this is where relativity comes in, I suppose. Heliopathy is not to be confused with heliotherapy but there is no reason not to find within these sounds some form of vibration that can tune or calm the spirit or nerves.

All the sounds you hear in this project derive from radio waves that were recorded October 7 to 18, 2024 during a period of increased Coronal Mass Ejections, during what astrophysicists are now calling an early solar maximum peak, a time when the sun pours out the most radiation in its 11-year cycle.

These sonoscapes are generated using Audiomulch and Max-MSP and rely on a set of field recordings of VLF (very low frequency) radios, shortwave HF receivers, ground wires (ELF) and various antennae and sine wave generators in harmonic phase with Schumann resonance.

Characteristic of my approach to VLF recording is that I carry the device in my hands and walk barefoot on the earth as I record, which results in a different dynamic than isolating the device. I consider that I am part of the field and my "body electric" is a vessel/conduit for transmitting these signals onto digital memory banks.

Some of what you hear are called sferics and the internet can provide you with bales of information on what they are, but basically they are particles bouncing off of one another in the ionosphere as it "breathes" and the geomagnetic impulse flow through the earth's polar axis affected by photon and proton overloads during a CME (coronal mass ejection).

I was guided towards my title by a friend who had been reading Henry Corbin's essay "Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi."

He found that the heliotropic flower in Ibn Arabi's telling, finds a heliopathy and reciprocity in its turning. In that the flower finds its sustenance in the sun, the sun too has an experience of its being through the flower. This being mystical Sufi thought entails the action of mediating messengers in a kind of circular gnosis. In my work as listener and composer I am mediating my experience of the flower of the Gaian entity (Earth) as it unfolds in the many petals of the geomagnetic plasmosphere via the auditory prostheses that allow my mind to surf other dimensions.

Jeff Gburek
December, 2024
Poznan, Poland 

releases February 14, 2025

 

 Further musings 

----on the process of foraging in the ether or the plasmosphere and beyond

while grounded into the earth ---

 

When I go out and work with the devices it's like I can encounter or create a more commprehensive nature connection beyond confines of skin and society -- like field recording but with an extended field that sort of becomes molecular and the subatomic, subliminal, evasive, seductive but already laid -- guided by gravitational waves, pulsars -- wide swaths of universal beathing

I go very easily into ego collapse and it's very strange to do the work in an environement where I must be suddenly be socially engaged and going back into rational language paradigms -- Because it's hard to explain the audiosphere, because, well, it's frighetning on a existential plane: we sense a time frame for phenomenon which carries on without the anthropocene context. And people don't like to hear that the life they've invested so much money in is actually already over. It's unsettling, perhaps.

While in the ego collapse of listening there is a contrary feeling: that nothing dies but is transformed, continues, goes onward into scattered vibrational tempi and, in a sense always, vascilles between being and not being. Life is somewhere in that indeterminate chemical shift between connection (binding) and disconnection (being unbound). In Arabic -- in what I've gathered from reading Ibn Arabi these months: it's the difference bewteen taznih and tasbih, which is the difference between rational cum logical assesment and the apparition or imagination. Full sense only occurs when they are both experienced. In the Sufism of Ibn Arabi -- they are both illusions but the imaginative illusion (tasbih) is the more complete because it involves creative engagement and faith through being present through one's self as witness. And creative action based upon synthesis. The role of art thus becomes more emphatic since these ongoing syntheses of the ways of experience take on a form, one after another. Each form represents the fullness and emptiness. The left and the right. Yin and yang. One can experience this without art but only artlessly. In art, it leaves one back at the beginning. It's an improvisation.

I got another radio device today-- and as usual, it's totally not doing what I expected it to do. But it's interesting to learn what it can do...to both evolve one's knowledge of the builder's intentions and to also create new applications without a template

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