Vigilance Suites I & II on Ramble Records, a few views and reviews.

       Album link:  https://ramblerecords.bandcamp.com/album/vigilance-suite-i-ii

 Please get in touch if you'd like physical copies of the double cd, since I have about 12 here in Europe. Otherwise, it's available directly from the label in Australia.

 "A dialogue with the Balkans musical tradition in contemporary transfiguration."

-- George Christian 

 Record Crates United review:

https://recordcratesunited.com/2022/06/03/may-2022-roundup/?fbclid=IwAR1RXDT3hkUfin5bWINBAWq7GwzuZPNdTAECG2rzknNQKtg4jg92sHGr86U

 Available through the great Ramble Records, Vigilance Suite I & II is Jeff Gburek utilizing guitar, zither and an e-bow to process the horror of the war that is currently still sweeping through his ancestral homeland of Ukraine.

The album’s music, 20 different suites spread across two CDs, is rich with tension and melancholia, but it does spiral off occasionally into side tangents and even light moments that evoke a sense of hope.

If Elkhorn’s acoustic improvisations and the more impressionistic work of Pelt are your thing, then this is a record that will move you to your core. Click here to get your copy today.

Elektro Seoul. New album on Akashic Records.

 

 

 

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/elektro-seoul

 

This is an album composed a few years ago, & lost, about the same time as  Twin Oscilators  --

 in the wake of the pandemic. I had just seen the director's cut of Bladerunner & I wanted to make a dystopian futuristic soundtrack to a non-existent sci-fi noir movie, a techno Alphaville. I needed a model city, one I didn't know at all, in order to have no preconceptions, only visual suggestions that came from the imagery I found online. I did no special research about the actual history of Seoul city although I am sure it is fascinating. My album was to be a city made of sounds, without history or a city in post-history. I recalled that I spent 6 hours at the Seoul airport on a lay-over to Tokyo once, watching the night skyline pale up into a murky yellow dawn of smog. I thought even back then about the techno-megapolis, the endless white lights of electrical modernist autobahns, flows of exhaust, permanent insomnia, ghosts of forgotten villages absorbed into the conurbation, devoured whole by mechanical madness, their sounds projecting themselves in the form of incessant robot squabbles and the collapsing mirrored panoramas of endless shimmering but filthy glass window-panes, facades, impenetrable, impersonal, too real and therefore surreal. And then finding in those spaces of absolute alienation some spirit of reflection, entering other dimensions through ricochets, cascades, impulses of purely fugitive sound, I imagined through these sounds a way to marvel at the space oddity of it all. 

All of this is still linked to life. And made me dance a bit in the skull.

Even on my feet. Maybe some of this works this way for you too. Let me know.

 

   Instruments: Hacked Roland MC-303, Arturia Microfreak Synth,

No-Input Mixer, Audiomulch, Beatpad App

 

Jeff Gburek

October 14, 2022

 

 

 

 

Cusp & Other Poems, January--May 2022

cusp

go to school, go to work,

kick the can, never crush it

play the song, leave the fray,

the self, swaddled in ivy

sweep your missing tail

across the leaves

 

let go of the song, let the bells mumble,

drunk on cloud-cover, the diamond idle,

allow a silken kimono, swaddle the skull,

eye-holes sprouting

tentacles of ivy

 

count as far backwards

all generations, alien ancestors

as count forward, into darkness

sound the font of every sun,

even the one which sieves

all laws of matter

up through thought, base of the spine,

sprouts through your ears

this aleatory, bristling,

widdershin canticle

spiralling inward

invisible ivy

*

 Bucza

through a broken window

corneal blisters, heaven's brooding,

 pinkish cloud, down in my heart,

         toe-jam, sciatica

            tingling droplets of rain wrought

   grubbily in the war gloom

            clenched in lacqeured finger-nails

                                             a handkerchief

 how you've come to sing me

      one last cante jondo through unmoving lips

          breaking into constitutional flames

  these worlds apart at all seams

      I have never, will never

see the like of your light again

        as it crushes me

     silence of the severed oak

 

may 5

 

 *

what is weaving the sky
Mayfalls gently

day number 10

*

chirality balls

 

when you are walking forward

at a good clip, the pivot to walk backwards

happens smoothly, whilst

walking backward, at a good clip

the swivel to straight

takes slightly more time, effort

risk of instability. why?

it's all about habits, training

--they may even be the same--

discipline is like water,

follows the routine: bless your anatomy

that guides the filtration, flow --

bless also the observation

that this is truly weird.

entropy topples ideas,

displaces direction.

when you seek the open

you are most alone.

the last thing

you thought.

 

* 

 

 

 

before the chips

 

a psy-fi poem for Ilaria Boffa

 

before the chips,

installed to prevent

child abductions,

we never could tell

when personal

informational cloud

fields were merging.

now we can even drive

personal informational

fields together by

algorithmic expansion

of contact frequency

so quickly that repulsion

begins unconsciously

and individual fields

contract, retract &

we subjects,

formerly sociable,

push apart, long

before we even meet.

personal informational

shields bind us.

markets enjoin,

keep us apart,

(each class without

knowledge of classes

ideally remains 

classless, alone)

alternative social

gravitationals.

honestly?

before the chips,

t'was hard to know.

 

 *

argonautical

 

dear there lonely in the grave unwritten

poems do frolic despite the clouds of mourning

gather and drift apart as faces do

and as words cohering vagrant sentence

thumb some ride beyond twilight and dawn

 

(dream poem under the hill)

 

may 14, 2022

 

 *

 

so many more pairs of you 

argos panoptis, guardian of the flock

 

 1)  to the so many more pairs of your eyes come sights

you never sought, as so many new or not so new

pairs of eyes cross, meet, turn away,

linger, avert, downcast, as so many do

normally, timidly, confused (thoughts far off)

on the right, on the left, male & female, undecided,

in process, the rooted & the transient

lockstep scandal gradient orbs

unknown, trudging, aimless

or purposely pushing prams,

children dressed as unicorns & pandas,

the black leather-clad fashion bicyclist

with spiked collar, a death's head helm

  silver    bracelets    gaunt    adult

pours the cocktails, shaken

2)  so many more pairs of legs, arms

hands potential to be clasped, rebound,

for the longer or shorter relations, triggered,

or to be avoided if there be no point

in our congregation, indeliberate, unawares

 our blues on ice, our clouds without tether

3) to the so many more pairs of ears

come both known & unfamiliar birds, sirens

as in every mind nest exotic memories

that will never reach any other place in time

dwelling nevertheless in the present invisible,

acorn or robin's egg fallen on cement

this sound too that streams between planes,

drones, the vehicles of our mad demise they devise,

let us be no better or worse for knowing

4) to all the countless unravelling narrative baskets,

torn & on the mend, I pledge some bills I don't have,

and a traveler's sense of grace, that you too, like all the forlorn,

in this placental sweat bag our bodies secrete around our form,

will resurrect in sunlight of this life, carrying on,

sleeping beneath these ever-turning, elegant phases of moon,

(they are elegant, are they not, when thought about, no?)

 

may you be well remembered or well forgotten, shone upon

equally as lost to darkness, forever therein found

 

 *

 

Money Pox.

We've all got it.

We all don't got it.

Money Pox.

Killing in the markets

and schools of the USA,

killing in, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine.

Money Pox, oily oligarchs,

phony pharma.

Money Pox, day & night.

Nobody doing right.

 

*

 

 

 sore wing's hole

inasmuch as

there persists an I

thrown over ages & climbs

good as that less bad one

can be the dream-hoard

or dream-herd, heard of ears

the bull-roarer wind in the chimney chute

flapping it's gaspier outlays

inasmuch as over the landfill

they name several settlements

razed for cornfield apartment complex

missiled into submission

this I cannot go on defending for many thems

when the garden of disenchantment

sprigs forth such varieties of brand

species sub-colonial simples

and complexity flowers

spoken of as if language's

naming owns when it's all

air in the sore wing's hole

 

*

 

Pharoah's Tarot, a new album on Akashic Records; in celebration of the music of Pharoah Sanders (October 13, 1940--September 24, 2022)

  

     

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/pharoahs-tarot

It's a very awkward moment to contemplate addressing you here in words about two events that I could not find myself able to speak about while alive, namely, the effect of Pharoah Sanders work on my life and the speechlessness that a personally felt death presents. I did not know Farell Sanders in any way, familiarly speaking. We never met. I saw him play once (ask me about that later) with Sun Ra's Arkestra in Oakland and at Knitting Factory (when there was the Knit, in Manhattan, that was it) some years later. It didn't matter much that we never met, I mean. I had always been meeting with this message here and there beyond. Because his tenor, meaning being polysemous here, caught me very early on through his almost miraculous (and to me, then, anonymous) appearance in the albums of John and Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, Sun Ra and then through his own albums as band leader, blowing these multi-voiced multiphonics, creating a feather shredding voice of flight with the reed. Peace is the will of the people and the will of the land. I quote, without quotation marks, the motto we hear in the album Jewels of Thought Jewels of Thought album. Jewels of Thought. It's almost incantatory. In the work of Pharoah Sanders I always found contemplation, passion, desire and discipline to be rather unbelievably resolved on the teeter, in the flow and ebb. How he ever managed to come to terms with trauma and make them resources for a progressive mantra sand-painting constantly blowing itself to scatter after assembling the ecstatic icon and re-casting it once again is something I mainly only experience in his music and a few others. That love and peace and spirit played itself out in the sensual and conflictual worlds of the sounds he released and organically organized. Full stop to fathom with reverence. And make reference to the fact that Pharoah's Book was always on the table of my life. I'd always return to Pharoah's book in times of the need for gnosis. Pure medicine. So I threw together my cards to make Pharoah's Tarot. One of the albums I heard made by Pharoah called Pharoah I actually heard in Berlin at the home of Anzu Furukawa on an LP that was stamped with the name of her old company Dance Love Machine. Sometimes, I feel so good, giving love to you. I hope and I pray you feel the same as I do. 

   https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/pharoahs-tarot

 Instrumentation: acoustic & electric guitar, zither, mandolin, cumbus, ebow, voices, ocarina, bird whistles, field recordings, media captures (interviews with PS)

 

The Perfect Storm: Collected Acousmatic Works with Voice 2020​-​2022

 

The Perfect Storm gathers together various pieces commissioned or requested of me between 2020 and 2021 inasmuch as they called for me to write and voice my writings in the form of an acousmatic composition insofar as I was able to come up with something that got published. And then there are two unsolicited original compositions (Sky Burial and Storm Within Storm). They are all soundscapes with voice-overs or utterances back-dropped by field recordings and incidental musics created from non-musical source materials. I should supply the texts for eager readers and I will attempt to do so before the automated publication date on July 31, 2022.

Black Holes Have Emotions is based on a suggestion of an AI GTP-3 that black holes indeed have emotions and upon the suggestion of Marjorie VH that I speak to the subject of Gray Angels.

Going is a collages of voice fragments and sounds aired by Joanne Schumann's very thought-fanning Earlids project.

Power Over Energy was commissioned by Rafal Iwanski for a compilation of Polish electronic music which occured at the time when I wrote the texts that I recite in the piece. The title is cribbed from Douglas Kahn's essay on something that connects to everything.

Sky Burial is an homage to fallen paratroopers addicted to thrills and death-rattle feats of risk like jumping out of planes and very much a meditation on the Conference of the Birds, Surrhawardi, the birds within us after and before the Sufi tradtions, before and after paleontology, the flightless birds of the Imagination.

Permanent Arrival. This song speaks for itself, I hope. There's no Walker Conkrite for Gypsies. Case forever undisclosed.

Storm Within Storm is the most recent and still the most innocent. It's karma is evolving. They used to say at a glatial rate when somehting was moving slowly.

The Way of All Cacti is where it's at. You thrive in the desert mainly because other predators and parasites can't figure out how to manage the same. Sounds like being a poet to me.