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Nakedly withdrawn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