Monday, December 4, 2017

The Falls of Hyperion

   
The Falls of Hyperion Karolina Ossowska Jeff Gburek 
recorded between September 2016--2017
     Field recordings heard on the album were captured in Romania,
Italy, Poland & Ireland. Instruments: Violins, Steel-String Guitar,
 Prepared Guitar, Microcassette, Thai Gongs, Hand-drum, Piano,
Inside Piano, Piezo Elements
(all reverb effects created by home-made plate echo),
Yamaha Keyboard, Goa Bells, Aluminum Gamelan, Voices, Snare,
Kocioł (Traditional Wielkopolska Tympani).
Texts: Lift Not The Painted Veil by P.B. Shelley
   & The Rushes by Jeff Gburek
Photographs & Cover Composition: Karolina Ossowska

 listen here:    https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-falls-of-hyperion

 
photo and composition by Karolina Ossowska














With a palpable sense of relief I pressed the "publish" button a few seconds, few days ago on the album (or sequence of compositions) I started thinking about in 2015 and despite what it says on the page, it began with a few violin passages I had asked Karolina to play in November 2015. The mood passed and the feeling would not return until the next autumn of 2016 when the 2 main tracks took the shape they retain here. The material spans our recent relocation to the other side of town and perhaps seals and allows us to release the quasi-rural life of Wilda (tongue firmly in cheek) and by the time October came round I had the final piece, Lift Not The Painted Veil, arranged, mapped and then executed all but for the poem that finally rained down with Orionid meteorite shower on October 21, which was rendered as voice-over on October 30th, 2017, in one sitting. There remains only to assemble the physical copies for the limited edition. Place your orders soon for those because both I and Karolina will be on the road over the Christmas/New Year's period. Sit back and listen, it's a long journey. Dreams and visions are the aim so fear not the veil. Be lifted. 

   listen here:    https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-falls-of-hyperion

In the core of the matter, the dark matter, in the hidden forces of nature which nature has yet to discover, as if in the first and last frontier of a mind that seeks to know, that seeks either science (demonstrable) or gnosis (intuitive): our theme. The first Hyperion is the one we know, by name, but even so, distantly, the Titan, the light-bearer, the high-one, star before the stars, the father of Helios and Selene, Eos and yet his own mother is Gaia, the Earth before the Earth as planet, the fiber of vibration in the cosmos. As one of the Titans who overthrew their father Ouranos, Hyperion and his ilk (not before giving birth to many other deities, among them Prometheus), are in turn overthrown, by the Olympians, then to suffer various forms of imprisonment, bondage and oppression. Titans living the life of an eternal underclass, defeated, untouchable gods. The otherness of Hyperion, the one of the Romantic traditions, specifically in these works: meditations on Keats' Hyperion Fragments. Keats with such hallucinatory musical language, that must stand alone, naked, on the page, sending it's tendrils of thoughts throughout various gravitational fields. Hyperion who struggles to awake and then struggles to sleep and remains a figure of insomnia or dreaming, as if a kind of background radiation, messages of the unborn impulse potential in nature before the nature of human colonization. These voices we would like to hear on the horizon our sounds call into. Dangling over the abyss of all languages. These are the sirens and the whistling caves on the edge of the sound.


photo by Hubert and Monika Wińczyk




Friday, December 1, 2017

Curtains of Silence, Open (Late November Poems)











        with this ring of light thee I wed
     those thoughts of which fallen
      through the net abounding
    calm the hellish down
       and pet the duck
       it's light photons of fire
      penetrate water
        and that is earthly all
                                                                                                 
                23.nov.AM


=  ====(((((((((((((*********))))))))))))====  =


and I thinking in one night
who reads the odyssey
or whether dreams cancel reality
and vice versa while walking in the błoto
around lake named after nymphs Rusałka
dream on paper boat sailor Rimbaud
did not Ginsberg address himself to Pound
Ezra when decrying
no herms in those mounts
a question for who knows
et who wants to fathom such
imaginary hand-shakes

nov23, late light



    Curtains of Silence, Open


             I
  
   new tape title ideas become poem accidentally by
"jeff gburek is a new name for me", he said,
 an old one for me said I
--on the birth and life of another mother for Edmund Husserl --
   we know dendrites meet dandruff unknowing the bend of the real round of the corner--
  of the split-ends we mend together, the synaptic hand-shake
we share, the maps unraveling crease & tear, speak of
context being everything when everything is nothing
 a chapter not a book a page unturning, tricklings
 and like a outworn map, the tectonic plates of the earth rend

          II

  a flash of fog, I mean of light
(photonic slivers, slits)
as if within the sterile beams a truck
struck an asteroid
avoiding a frog
while the spider insider
weaves the garrulous gloom
sucking blackholes
from behind the moons
that Ophelia strung
on the clothesline
for your eyes alone
to ponder in the floral
wilderness of berry 
  
                 III

           that's the bunker where they bury
           the closet of tattle-tale
           clinker and clank of Cytadela
           be they keys or rattles
           wooden hollows
           the things they drape
           the robes upon
           one guesses aghast
           and walks by quickly
           stuttering numbers
           codes of prayer
           to let this now pass
           in peace between
           the two tall pines
           of the new year
           at last redeemed
           in the loss of name
             --they who fall into Earth
               become Earth
                without name--
         
             dawning there
           in skylark's cue
           to the night-thrush,
           blossom, Venus
           speed you, Saturn
           flare aware, take the aged young
           youthless Hyperion's
           glare away

    IV
          
these are the songs
of happiness and longings
yet to be invented
in the pent up sequence
that rejoins torn fractals
and run flesh over memory
as the one who died
once upon a time
forever in the rush
of water healing
the fragile nimbus
gourd for gathering
nutriment of promise

be held here, then, see
the pain of your stars'
receding cantation
in shifting texture
lightly by arms
as in birth
and eye crystalline,
guide you the flesh
and hands extended
openly in greeting
that year without year
rhymes as eternal
invisible lavender
extract of soul, yours,
for all to sense
freely in essence of day
 as nights first announcer
asleep as ever

    V
& the curtains of silence
hung about the horizon
draped about everything,
of the thing, shifting ever
what it is, as beckons
or beacons & with urgency
cloaks the normalized
perverse in mourning envy
roaring or sobbing
boring or 
sirens the webbed
sleep alive to
stir softly your
nobler organs
where to paint caves
 of primordial genius in hope
& earth, universal
turns the torus
equators anon


Coda,

a flash of fog came through
a sliver of photons
 dithering dew
fragile nimbus lord bearing
 a new name to us all
a name we cannot spell
the dendrites dripping
 hypertextual grins

some stars of words just floating in my cranium
 grazing, grassing
the ceilings of the brain

the tape itself, the torus of horus,
 the torah borealis, could be called
in the realm of the ultrapersonal

"curtains of silence hung about the thing"

and yet what do I know
that resides outside language
and knows much better?

11.30.2017











Sunday, November 12, 2017

Three Poems, October, 2017





  Hyperions

within our sleep
dreaming together a world
too much rapid-fire non-sense
jumping the guns
out in the wild west
or in catalan
amid the many
in the one
I cannot fathom
the trigger
but a cause
for alarm asks
where are we going
people?
whose holier
storm of selva
oscura are we
paying for
now?
 listen, details, in the slick
from outside-in
tumbling inside
out in the day
the face
the die cast
once human
over-drawn
by cloud.
I can look out only
then glance
backward
then forth
short of the vile
and live a while
longer & see

10/2/2017

Annoyments of Resizing
aka Back Button

signal to me
your relativity
& my bane of decisions
never leaving peculiarity aside
disassembling incisions
only to cut & hastily
paste them back
into leap space gap across
the paradox of density
where infinitely
tiny slats occupy
fractal galaxies of
unknown inbetweens
blocked from view
& driving language
mad with reversal
trying to top
arrows of time

10/3/2017

For Some

Poetry is like an oyster
the girl jet black or her hair
stepping back to graze
upon her image in the glass she passes
-- unawares --
without pause a privilege
to be her ear's mirror
wrapped in gainful employment
& striding with vigor
as she pins the flame-tipped letters
upon the air her radical fingers
weave with indifferent fury

For some, elegantly strewn
chestnut leaves in the gutter
sharply breed storm
in the lungs and quicken
the curling of toes into shoes
that glimmer of catkins,
 the edgy humor,
 of moon's last passage
-- that could be, just the thing...

Other people, however
 discern little music
in the duck-stutter & flash
of conglomerate algae
sunken in the pond, dotted
by concentric circlets
invisible raindrops
maybe cause

 And some yet
paint in stillness
the leopard-eyes' rods and cones
their own jungle geometries
scratch into codes
written as silent satellites
beyond the limits of the sky
wherein one imagines
the one thing
we all have known.

The nothing we have in common.

Dominion of darkness
embossed or etched stars
of goddess Nut overarching
Fear and fear-cancelling fear
for the tremors in the first Earth of me
I have forgiven unforetold
the hundredfold ebonite scars,
or maybe simply
I have forgotten

Open light wet on the grasses
where pigeons peck their infinite lunches
until as one flock as if one wing
they as you I and all cardinal
points appear to disappear

 Dropping as a canopy of stars elsewhere
the yellow leaves
autumnal dreams, such as these
Hyperion heaves, with groaning
Words-- only to those who speak English--
or to those also audient
for hidden worlds
where all Earths fall apart

.to pieces

.memory gathers

for some, for others...

October, 5, 2017







Saturday, November 11, 2017

Middle Harvest, 2017




Middle Harvest, Final Harvest
        a title brought to mind by the Gaeilic
names for September & October
for these were the months in which the Autumnal reaping
 of moods revealed departures from the imaginary Ireland of this Summer
   wherein I released my hold on the idea of an isolated island life,
Meán Fómhair, Deireadh Fómhair, names for other times
and so with letting go of dreams, in the Taoist Wu-Xing calendar
 the dreams of wood, 
 meeting with the metallic urgency of
     and with this Golden Autumn in Poland,
the premature, unwise, scraping clean of the forest
 amid protests and resistance of activists
      in the old growth forest of Puszcza Białowieska
    as if an unacknowledged struggle between species were underway...

*
 Annoyments of Resizing

signal to me
your relativity
& my bane of decisions
never leaving peculiarity aside
disassembling incisions
only to cut & hastily
paste them back
into leap space gap across
the paradox of density
where infinitely
tiny slats occupy
fractal galaxies of
unknown inbetweens
blocked from view
& driving language
mad with reversal
trying to top the
arrow of time

*

The poem, I guess, is some place I disappear within.
It's like a sound that doesn't quite exist made by nothing
quite there yet hard to ignore,
too soft to ignore, like a cat's paw
upon the yielding straw
where the perishing of the universe
bends the bending of the universe perishes,
the curvature going flat.

*

   Up to 11

out of the anti-fa and into the fire
being correct is always politically so
as when they comment on a music video (ee0-ee0)
"ah, everything in Iceland is perfect!"
every emotion is perfectly expressed, every street-volcano
top-notch, clean and snow-glistening, all politically tight,
cute as the dandruff on Bjork's shoulder, blackened
so they say, deep up into the northern lights,
there is an effect derived from being relentless
Mika Vainio, dead in the trenches of techno
& would that be what you mean
by politics-- made of snare drum, horns, you know, marches
fajerwerki, ragged glory holes, 21 gun saloots
versus random laborious bubbling
as if philosophy meant exhausting a series of pertinent questions
while whatever stumbles to the wayside
& "whatever" comes to mean "so what" and "fuck off"
it's always less shocking to report, rather than witness,
something which almost always happens to me
quite different than something which "almost" happened to me
(which never squander'd my flesh)
in that the "something" concretely befalling others
I have seen or felt nearly (near to me)
in the place of all these people
happens nearly enough to become personal memory
and the ironic "whatever" dissolves

into an objectivity (no one experiences)
like turning the resonance up to 11
 
& the fray shudders inside the letters
standing back from the lips
crushed by mispronunciation
into figures of democratic convention,
they say, they need you, to speak for them, the dead,
but you sing, to them, speak to them, instead
& if anyone is over-hearing, think on us
as birds in any forest,
gathering leaf & worm
for the nest in the winter-bound skull



*

 10/2/17

 within our sleep
dreaming together a world
too much rapid-fire non-sense
jumping the guns
out in the wild west
or in catalan
amid the many
in the one
I cannot fathom
the trigger
but a cause
for alarm asks
where are we going
people?
whose holier
storm of selva
oscura are we
paying for
now?
 listen, details, in the slick
from outside-in
tumbling inside
out in the day
the face
the die cast
once human
over-drawn
by cloud.
I can look out only
then glance
backward
then forth
short of the vile
and live a while
longer & see


*



 Four Poems for Rupi Kaur, Almost.
10/8/2017
  

 1

when I was young I didn't understand the ways of duffers.
as a duffer I suffer the spell check interruptor & (as a duffer)
I do not understand the ways of the young. (I suffer)
I speed up and they say slow down I say this is the way to fly
and that writing is like sincerity the practice of being alone.

press share button. I go out into the streets to find
discursive content with people. 
what do you mean discursive content.
I don't know it's something I saw on the web.
oh what browser do you use? I always thought browser
sounded like a large & lazy word.  hey, don't talk to people 
with words stolen with words stolen from your old poems 
like people are just palaces
for some auto-correctional poetry to happen in.
these people ought to get a grip on what you mean.
before the buttfire grips them.
the fire down below


  2

sometimes I feel like this.


just that.

I know you know what I mean.
I come through the screen.

 3
everything with words. ripped out of the magazine of your mind.
travel one century back into a recognized literary masterpiece.
what are opera glasses? I've been to an opera once or twice.
Sat up front. closed my eyes. almost fell asleep. they are kind
of like binoculars just smaller and more useless for birding.
what's birding. like bird watching I guess. you have to have been there
in the forest to know what I mean. we used to be surrounded,
you know. not really. are you thinking people will understand
when you shift into dialogue? can't tell yet.
but they say if you look through the opposite end
of the opera glasses the world looks different.
opposite end? yeah. we have to find a way to
try it out sometime. sounds subversive

 4

it's okay to say what you want.
say anything you want at all.
rest assured I am not listening.
it will help you to relax.
chocolate helps reduce stress
 & raises dopamine levels.
remain affectionately ironic
& ahead of the hate game.
above all, be happy you are not that other person
coming down off the high
and that the lift isn't broken
that the steps are not crumbly,
that your life isn't.
it's a long climb























The Rushes, October 21 (Lift Not The Painted Veil)
 written as a dream passage
  waking, and walking, into the rushes


1
written between ripples
owing something to the name of the further father
matriculating would be
what we could be

automatic water

waiting to fall
anywhere now
under high pressure
down to earth
& walk among the people
unafraid & covered in hollyhocks

waving very fine lines of thought
attached to a stick like a dandelion

ready to blow in the wind
the answer my friend

what we have waited a lifetime
to remember before

/waiting for the end of the sentence
/waiting for the pen to kick in
/waiting and wondering
/where the next
/paycheck...

the flood of memory fills
the gap of love in life
and life in death
disperses the reversal
into knowing nerves
that fire again
& hatch inside a nest
inside a skull
forever woven forever weaving
the magnetospheres two
neutron stars once black
holes merged into ejecting
intra- then extra-uterine
struggles to be born
once again feeding hormone
puzzle wrapped in muscular
contractions fit to timed
expansion of the margin
this syllable this sibilance
& siren out of nowhere
such as Orionid pebbles
scattered scintillant
dew on unmown lawns

the cirrus sky above
serene swaddling mesosphere
raise up the pole of the world-tent
raise it down as well
for these are the directions
the water curls to belly out
where the sun shines longest
for this particular blue-bird
whose tail-feathers we prize
for our mother's pillow
for our mother's crown
that is light to fly with
waiting for the mountains to settle
forms into sensible forces
streams to bath hands
send the salmon initial
wisdom of the berry born

2

stay as you are
your hands bound behind
head into the wagon
in the world of the lira
is Poland the flat 5 coin?
Germany the 6? what pigment
darkens so
the Baltic Sea
 red border,
red guards, rubedo order
the trade of perishable gods
of perishable goods
these strange leaf-shapes
cover the countries
are the countries themselves
who would rather be forests

what? do you think
they grow on trees?
you have to work for it
you have to work with it
free hands
form Europe afresh
awake this morning
history's dream
they are the double-doors
double-doors revolving
sending souls two ways
the inner or outer
depending on
depending on everything
there being no points of view
other than many
only you there unite them
you have to work with it
get behind the wagon to push
because the wheels are stuck in the mud
you can't leave it to the animals

pluck up your nerve

many eyes in the window slits
prompt cursor

I can see it all from where I am standing
everyone speaks about it openly now
as if the pain lingering
where the last memory of some life without love
there was dark black fire-cloud
explosion planes out of nowhere
out of blue emerging

speaking of needles, here's one
fits into groove, crackles
the noise of it's master (replay)
entry of figure into weapons cache
instead all cassette tapes
scribbled titles, faded ink
espionage of fossils
"BEES WAY GONE"
& when the red blood of this vine
leaf runs down the walls
of the Chemical Collegium
 discovery (itself) with skeletal fingers
turns the page (alone)

alone with these words
encourage the young
never lose faith in study
of the magical science

leading a childish love-life
among angels
know it or not
you just might be


***********************

writing
in the same coat
I wrote
this in
ten years
ago

your breath there
in the oscilloscope
the mouth of the earth
pouring pure
waters forth
the chattering ducks
& dummy ducks
float upon


*****************___
+++++++++++++++++++++++
*******************************************

so, now we have a situation where a man sets himself of fire, in Warsaw, with intention, with a manifesto & here is not a point in this manifesto I find contrary to my views. he is of my age and lies in critical condition somewhere, a family outside Krakow... and his spirit that is calling out to me is this burning of autumnal leaves for who? For every injustice he feels, I must feel also. His pain is my pain. His desperation my own. Everywhere you go in this country, the people have the same complaints. My wife does the job of her bosses on Sundays which they cannot perform during the week and is paid no more for her efforts. We struggle with absurd tax laws. We have a health care system that keeps you on your toes: be healthy, because there's nothing it pays for. Women's rights are eroded. Thugs wander the streets and trams harassing foreigners. The government doesn't want to accept refugees but wants the EU subsidies. They cut down the forests and know one can tell where the timber or the profits go. The constitution is a lost scrap of paper in the wind of history? And flesh burns mixed with lighter fluid. Rehearsal or curtain?    ---  meridians for Piotr S ---




********************** ________________---------------
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.......................

On this Day
(Three Status Update Poems)



October 23, 2016 at 11.14pm

wear a barrel
over your head
open a small door
cut into the barrel over your head
let your skull rattle
in the barrel
like tongue in the mouth
wailing ululations

open a window
on the night of the infinite
it is a window
in the flesh of the night
let the sheer curtains
flow through the gap of it
sheer curtains over the aperture
and through the frame blowing
sheer curtains blown by the wind of poetry
to blow the words written
on the sheer curtains of
poetry into the wind
of the infinite
(do not await the human accord
but write with the wind
and curtain
washing time

*

 October 21, 2012 at 4:50pm

a spider-web spun over my wine-glass by
night or what night always one in the many
sitting tight in the tense centrum of fragility

*

October 30, 2014, 3:44am

no apostrophe
should i go beyond
all god all word
I'd only find this secret
deep in the recesses
a series of conjectures
wrapped up in rituals
the eyes in the mirror
appear to be
unable to see

to sing the infancy of the unborn
and draw an infinite line
i cannot show you
music of molecules unstirred

my own hands having
stolen themselves
my feet running away

if you want no god
please don't applaud































Thursday, October 5, 2017

Radio Wide World, Signals of Otherness, 2017

 

Radio Wide World, Signals of Otherness _______-------------
------------------- 20-year Retrospective, 2017 -----------

Out in my morning walk a few days ago in Poznan, I had a thought or sequence of thoughts. With my friend, the poet and musician -- Christopher Funkhouser -- in mind, regarding the idea, implied maybe in his statement about sound editing, "If can still hear the words, some noise is okay..." and these thoughts were about sounds and shortwave radio, sound, and how words are sometimes only sounds (when we know the sounds (form) a word, we think it's a word of language, a sign in that kind of system) but when we don't (know or understand) the word, it's just sound (obviously, I'm talking about speech, not about writing) but somehow, even when spoken, part of the word is (just) sound and this sound also has an relationship to itself as pure sound (phoneme) which has only convention in common with the words (signifiers). Words as such are therefore like signals which we associate in this ratio of signal to noise. Some noise is okay. As long as the signal is clear.

As long as the signal is clear. But this is the fuzzy grey zone of cross-signalling leakeg where, I saw (envisioned, heard, auditioned), all of a sudden, a great new listening adventure, when I was living in Florence, Italy in 1993 and I began late night listening vigils: the Radio Wide World recordings.

It began rather by accident. I had switched on the radio option instead of the cassette deck, with the dial between stations, then turned back to reading, only to be distracted by the late night drift of two  radio stations merging sounds together. When I touched the antennae, another voice entered the mix. I found a blank cassette, plugged it i, pressed record and found myself repeating this action until the wee hours, illuminated by candle-light, Chianti, hand-rolled cigarettes & aliens in the ether. At the end of a week I had filled 12 cassettes with this aleatoric dream-scape and almost lost track of my literary studies.

Shortwave radio was ad un colpo a new force in my life and it was while living in Europe I experienced the heightening of the consciousness that reality is woven of various languages, some of which do not even know that they are there, co-existing, mutually present to one another, separated by a veil. People speaking their many languages in the train station in Bologna became the first correlate. The realities, the stories of all those people, shared out in strings of sentences I hear myself only in fragments. This sense of the woven texture of reality trailing of into the invisible or inaudible was heightened, taken to another level again, when I stumbled into these late night shortwave transmissions from around the world. Languages were mingling and scrambling around one another. Static, heterodynes, carrier signals, side-bands, LFO's and satellite bleep codes, numbers stations, universal atomic clock, solar flares, magnetic resonance, morse code... there seemed to be an ether filled no longer with mere noises but with a million or more undecoded signals. Later I would learn about ionic bounce and grayline propagation but even that didn't dissolve the mystery. Some signals were hiding other signals, deliberately, and accidentally. Signals were emerging from different times (I heard what seemed to be a re-broadcast of a Futurist radio programme or a simulation thereof -- songs from the 30's and 40's played in the same dream-zone of the present). I started to feel like there was/is only one great burgeoning language, only an infinite vocabulary, and signals within signals, and within what we called noise, there must be, I thought, information, signals, signals of otherness. Ever since this moment of moments, I have been a listener, searching for a sense beyond sense and non-sense, a searcher for sense within non-sense. More to the point, I am a seer of sense in non-sense and I am a hearer of words not spoken only by humans but by all the others around us, within us. This became the thread in the labyrinth I have followed ever since in my life. It led me back to music, to dance, to drawing, painting & sculpture, field recording, to the music I call my own, my own kind of Post-Cagean music. I want to close this writing for now, because, well, I must stop it, only for now, because something I am saying may be hiding something else I am saying and that I want to understand this and that I want you to understand or feel something on your own. Which is why I felt I had to make these recordings in the first place.

The original remixes of the cassettes recorded in Italy in 1992-1994, 1996, 2001. At the Soundcloud page there is an older written description, accurate enough, which I will leave unchanged.
https://soundcloud.com/radio-wide-world 

The Radius (Jeff Kolar) running mix (he makes the above into one long string of sounds, published 2011).  https://soundcloud.com/theradius/episode11

Radio Wide World has been aired in Chicago, NYC area (WFMU), Kunstradio, Vienna and aired as an installation in Zaragosa (ES), Marseilles (FR), Atlanta, Georgia (USA), and on October 3rd, 2017, as part of Beacon at the Museum of Art and Design in NY.
Many thanks to all the supporters over the years such as Jeff Kolar, Meredith Kooi David Goren and many others whose names escaped after the myspace hack and my many relocations.

Please find my continued Shortwave Radio recordings made while traveling and experimenting with new gear on my bandcamp page. Special remixes and global listening interface experiment, ambient and noise, all at once, for the curious, the searcher, the figure of the outward.
https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/flux-permittivity-radio-wide-world-the-r-329-urr-shortwave-phonographies

 Among the most recent, new composed tracks:
 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/track/mad-beacon-remix-2017

 https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/fearless-shortwave-radio-scroll

Post-Script, Feb. 18, 2018

   Over the years I have reflected on the role of shortwave radio in the music of Stockhausen and in the hands of Keith Rowe spiking many concerts and recordings of AMM. And as time goes on, I watched the internet slowly take over waves of human consciousness and to a great degree replace the nook in culture where once the cathode tube radio shined like a beacon. Shortwave radio is nowhere near as diverse as it used to be and the transmissions certainly have decreased even as the fascination with numbers stations, the Conet project, and other aspects of Radio Art began to catch fire. But the initial inspiration for me has always stuck with me as being linked to the turn of the century occult fascination with the ether and the voices of the ghosts, the ancestors, the archetypal entities or the aliens similarly sending messages out into endless space (and maybe only hearing their own messages bounced back to them). There is a song on American Music Club's album California called "Somewhere" and since I would frequently hear AMC perform when I lived in San Francisco in the 1980's, I've wondered if I had been influenced by the idea of searching for signals of the so-called "living" in this radiophonic Elsewhere. Mark Eitzel's lyric comes to mind again and again as a reminder that obsession springs often from obscure suggestion. Not only does it make sense in terms the search back then, but also for the present moment, as the search for the living, or the meaning of being alive, continues. 


"She finally gets on the bus
And sits down next to a very nice lady
Who just got out of the hospital
She had a major operation
The doctor left a knife in her throat
And now it picks up radio waves
You can turn the dial 'til it comes off in your hand
Maybe you'll pick up a populated land 
Where somewhere, 
Somewhere, I'm sure somewhere,
 There's people living" 

 




Monday, September 25, 2017

Waiting for the Title to Download Poem











If Madrid were only 055 kilometers away
I would more often visit such a rich
and beautiful city, several days
if not weeks per year. Or perhaps I’d stay
forever there, from now on, soon
after arrival. But we never know
what, if any of these things we dream may happen
and Madryt is actually 1,055 kilometers away
according to a broken, old stone mile-marker
at Rondo Kaponiera in the city of Poznan, Sunday morning.
Odessa, in contemporary Ukraine,
located 1,185 kilometers off, I am told
sits on the edge of the Black Sea, the inhospitable.
On the pavement outside the cafe, where I drink black coffee,
there is a dead bird, a wren, silent
and still, in the middle of the open courtyard,
as if the bird, feathers totally intact,
smooth to the touch, almost alive,
had suddenly dropped out of the sky, blue now,
where the airplanes fly in lower to land
on their approach. I see them often, hear them more.
How very loud they are.
August 20, 2017


Thursday, September 14, 2017

Perfectly Imperfect Curtains Turned


   I urge you one last time to reconsider. You can feel the wind in the room, the curtains are moving in  the draft and a door slowly closes. Think of what it must be outside.  --  John Ashbery

 Perfectly Imperfect Curtains Winds Joined Together

 That was the title I gave to Marco Lucchi for this series of conjoined yet subtly discrete improvisations performed on acoustic guitar (which you can listen to by clicking on this text) one morning when I was immobilized by pain in the sacrum region. As it was imagined for one of Marco's many generous, open-call collective projects, this one called Some Perfect Curtains, I was wrapped up in the imagery that these words themselves provided me poetically, as some drapery or veil, some curtains my windows here do not have, and then found myself playing as if I could see these curtains forming shapes as if stirred by winds. Something of pure inspiration in that. Marco's concept for the compilation was to have the piece composed as if a perfect final track (final curtain) to an imaginary album. Then I discovered, on this day, that it was the day John Ashbery passed away. The imaginary wind in the room then took on a more ghostly character, such that engraved the sounds with different significance, although the listener is not obliged to pay any attention to such elements of self-hypnotism the artist employs to get him or herself to move forward on an uncertain path. Shortly afterward, I wrote a score to describe the ideas that had been rippling through my mind into the fingers.


                            score to play only imperfect curtains
                            seen only by the wind
                            seen only by the mind
                            that stirs them in the score
                            to play the data ripples
                            with ever the wind to feel
                            no potential moment at rest
                            seeing nothing...
                            wind that stirs (them)
                            mind that stirs
                            alone who they are 



                                  
                          I urge you to think of what must be outside...

for further "perfect curtains" check in to this 
     https://soundcloud.com/musichevirtuali/sets/some-perfect-curtains-vol-2



Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Entitled Imagery (Rubedo)

reminded one late night of the moon the voice of remaining a freak against the norm
the expression of the varieties of psyche the stories to be told an the stories to be untold in the service of personal liberation in order to help others from the selfless place of concern.

there is no god out of mind just as there is potentially mindless god everywhere we can't know and god is in the mind either with good reason or with other reasons that maybe are not reasons at all but just the facts (both western and eastern traditions recognize this). humans don't know that they don't know god because mostly they have given up trying or invented an egological excuse based on an ideology that positioned their egological parasite to make sense in the system of values in terms that works for them socially. cool. but it doesn't always work for me because socially speaking people still make really bad mistakes based on self-service ideologies rooted in the enlightenment forms of social philosophy that rely on an exploited human resource or slave economy. and they make people suffer and they waste resources. (I consider enslavement and exploitation to be linked to something more primordial than class-conflict on the human level. to this extent, I am not really a humanist while I don't have any affinity with vulgar nietzscheanism and misanthropy. people are here. we absorb nutrients from the environment. we should be willing to pay it back or lessen our withdrawal. as seems intuitive.

Sunday, September 10, 2017

About the Perpetual Motion of People into Unknown Phases

About the Perpetual Motion of People into Unknown Phases
for Chris Barron, Charles Whittaker, Stephen Ellis

I wanted to try to say something just in terms of life being put together by moments indeterminate 
in themselves growing steadily more seemingly determined by a choice of steps

Starting out how to say, just let by-gones go bye-bye, waves across the wide bay
ever so seemingly hypocritical, I can't chase and be free

It would be too great an effort to stand in this wind, 

to the plastic schrapnel, the bones that hit me
too rotten to pierce with pleistocene acuity the thoughts of flippant spanners

Browser seems like such a lazy word. Our minds not uploading apparently.
Sooner or later they will be unable to dig tunnels without encountering other tunnels

Subterranean grumblings, war bubbles, rising waters 

& wish you will the breach was not
nor within such red anthills poke your hobbling third leg of legend (had you once)

Don't fuck the with past and don't fuck futures either please stop fucking fuck with fuck
while they stiff with ears offer applause for the unruly downfallen

Our wings surprise horizons shrouded volute grain scatter and cascade
these sheets of leaves written within eras of compression open

Is there any light on in the retrobotteghe that reaching the front stores reversal
Lovely the dark so be it the sound of convertibles whizzing by

Another ambulance within who drives the winning against the clock/

 might advantage the battery outwitting energy but time itself a rock

Within my earth are many broken twists and turns rejoined to essential losses
those mending the total never seen but outlasting back and forth

Double bar double double bar loop of enduring spin
without infinite repeat the complete will remain search for one last over

Appended I, finally
begun



Friday, September 8, 2017

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











Thursday, September 7, 2017

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