Been a good run here since since the first posts while living in Berlin about Muslimgauze and interspecies comms in a dream travelogue with Yannick Dauby -- but it's time to move.
I am listening to this wonderful distant sonoscape as of this writing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUY9Fvb1yRU
Sungai Bidut is a historical and residential area in Sibu, one of the main towns in Sarawak, Malaysia
Please find me on Substack and subscribe of follow
https://substack.com/@jeffgburek1
From the amazing Ajam Media Collective https://ajammc.com website whose multiple deep dives into Turko-Persian Trans-Caucasian headspace is immersive and consistently reveals more of what I never knew I did not know.
Sufi-Flamenco singer Star Aziz Balouch
a traveler convinced that Flamenco came from what is now called Pakistan !!!
article was written by Stefan Williamson Fa, an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist currently working as a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham
https://ajammc.com/2021/01/11/sufi-flamenco-aziz-balouch/
Then this from Mountain of Tongues label, a re-issue of a gemstone recording of Azerbaijani guitarist Rüstəm Quliyev
https://mountainsoftongues.bandcamp.com/album/r-st-m-quliyev
Mountains of Tongues is dedicated to preserving and promoting lesser known music from the Caucasus region. We focus on music and its role in the everyday lives of people living in the region, with an intentional disregard for rigid notions of authenticity or genre; sounds from the intersection of the modern/traditional, the participatory/presentational, and the sacred/secular.
Sandipen, Salaam!
Oriental Traditional Music Blog by Tawfiq: a wonderful archival rabbit hole. Hindustaani, Dhrupad, Qawwali, Iraqi Maqaam, Russian folklore and more with hundreds of download links for vinyl rips and out of print cassettes from all over the shops... While Tawfiq's own blog seems to be dormant since 2019 and none of the download links are functional all the blogs that are linked to are online and updated. I will post some of the other links below also
https://oriental-traditional-music.blogspot.com/
https://www.blogger.com/profile/00332824027946814674
https://www.flatblackandclassical.com/
https://iraqimaqam.blogspot.com/
https://qaul.blogspot.com/
https://zhuzhulingo.blogspot.com/
https://bolingo69.blogspot.com/
"I look at the world like a simultaneity of past lives and personas. It started when we got back from Italy and were first living in Brooklyn. I was working at that paint shop Sirmos in Long Island City. You remember the Citicorp building, the lone blue green glass monolith that at that time was the only building of that height and stature in that area. I was walking to the G train after work. It was end of summer early fall and the sky had dramatic Turner/ Frederick Church type clouds and I was struck by this overwhelming feeling that I had lived this before. That I was some artisan in the service of some king or something, and that Citicorp building was some ziggurat. It was beyond overwhelming, like two lives superimposed over each other, identical."
I remember you spoke about this moment-- at the foot of the ziggurat, of blue glass. I’ve had similar experiences -- in many places. I feel attuned to this kind of resonance. Your message also got me thinking about why we get anchored into the past as archetype? Why do we want to forget the future? What if we look at time all wrongly? Rather than the Ziggurat as template for Citicorp, what if Citicorp was the previous life of the Ziggurat? Or are we always in the same situation or scenario and the names only change? Why don't we know the future name for this structure? If we knew the name could we not re-name it, change it? Is there no escape? Is there anything our creativity can to do to alter things or is it already written in some kind of fossil?
By implication, if I interpret a bit what you say, it seems to me we are always in the shadow of some pyramid, megalith, volcano, oppressive market system, government. Some source of shock and awe. But I seriously wondered about the thought process that keeps us snapped into our trapped dimensionality here.
Why can't they see the vision nor hear the music?
I have been having dreams I don't want to wake up from where everything is very good humored and always morphing. Seriously having a good time being Morpheus and the Mother of Morpheus. What keeps me from being able to communicate this sense to people? Why can't they see the vision nor hear the music? Thinking about your Citicorp and Ziggurat as two incarnations or configurations of archetype, I asked myself again the question about time and, if it is possible, to see around the corner of the megalith. What does it rest upon? There are suns far larger than our own. And Gaia has her own body-mind. Still, the human fixation is such that it can become nerve-wracking and frustrating.
I'm thinking about, hey, why don’t we get a future “glimpse” or sense of what’s coming out of this kind of moment, because it’s as if we could walk into the next manifestation of this identical or parallel scenario. Or bypass it. If we only knew how. What if we are already the future, that future we would rather be be and just don’t know it?
Why can't I go out dressed magically?
Buddhist and Vedic meditators melt time into ooze evaporating into transparency -- "all the time".
So what? Why can't I go out dressed as a magically mirror-faced four-legged walking wardrobe with constantly changing hair color cracking jokes in a language whose rules of grammar are being made up as each foot falls into the span of wing that sweeps away into some plasma naming itself via movement? Is that not what is happening? Why are we bound to this brain-span that is “getting a job and walking the walk?’
What is a Boltzmann Brain?
Anyway, even before this so-called morning, I went to sleep after reading an article that maybe your Citicorp/Ziggurat stardust put in my way via synchronicity. About the Boltzmann Brain. The thrust of the paper was multi-tiered, co-authored by three science geeks, so I cannot cram it into a few sentences. But one thing they wanted to show was that the classical Newtonian second law physics of entropy that results in this hypothesis that there is a Past moment (previous state), the Past Hypothesis, that is not any different from the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis, which states that a brain can exist, exactly like mine or yours, with all it's experiences and memories firmly in place while being created by entirely random combinations of elements and forces of the universe in millennia of evolution. This Boltzmann Brain would be your brain but without you. A pretty strange idea. The paper discusses how the role of circular reasoning in the Boltzmann Brain is in exactly the same circular reasoning used to justify the Past Hypothesis (where there is some historically or scientifically verifiable version of reality, with a starting point and an endpoint -- like the Big Bang. So basically the Boltzmann Brain Hypothesis called into question all theories about memory. Memory is a memory of a memory. How an event got stored as a memory of an actuality is subject to the law of entropy. The further away you go into time, the more it is just memory of memories. It became such a maddening thought that I hit google maps, plugged in the address of the house I lived in with my parents in 1970’s, where father’s parents lived upstairs (also with Babcia Florence) upstairs, a house that had belonged to the previous generation of the family, 416 Walden Ave, Buffalo, Neuvo Yawk. I did this search because I recall it was still standing years ago, unlike other Buffalo houses where I or other family had lived, razed after fires, cleared. I found 416 Walden Ave there on the street view. The surroundings had changed but the house itself looked structurally unchanged from the outside. I felt pretty sure I could still map the inside, sketch it out for anyone. I still can walk in this house of my memory. And yet, boom, there it was: I could not verify any of this. Probably never will be able to. If I could however, it would not allow me to change the past because it must always be that way. But will this house always be as it is? It seems highly improbable but it is a question of structure: 416 Walden has a large-basement and strong foundation. It stands because it has this solidity of stone. Monolith. I also noticed the house two doors away, which in the old days was the domicile of the family of the caretaker of the Concordia Cemetery, it too still stands. This house connected to the Stability of Death and its burial grounds rooted like it’s trees into the soil and culture. 416 Walden Avenue was said often to be a haunted house. They meant ghosts of the past and perhaps traumatic events. I wonder if the house was not actually haunted by it’s Future. Why does my mind return there so often? If the power of my thought is that strong to haunt, I should have more money in the bank. This of course is taking things a bit too far.
Regarding Boltzmann Brains:
In Reverse Order of their Chronological Apparitions in Gaia's Space-Time Coordinates, as of this Typing, where Reverse & Order is taken as a Nod & Bow to the Currently Dominant Materialistic Linear Chronotopy.
(an Asterix, that little snow-flake star, will be Affixed to the Volumes that are Strictly Field Recordings-- by which I mean that all the sounds where recorded in some sort of real-time on-site)
(a double Asterix indicates a Hybrid Collection where some Instrumental Overlays app-Ear --added later in the Studio and Veering over into Soundscape)
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/sound-travels-in-babadag-romania
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-apple-orchard
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/grindu
** https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/baltic-ozones
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/fire-sky-june-4-2024
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/iftar-with-the-swans-march-15-2024
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-radio-the-sea
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/padurea-comunei-ordoreu
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/charleston-south-carolina-2006
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/bulgaria-sound-specific
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/polish-soundscapes
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/eirelans
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/romania-phonographies-2015-2016
** https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/baranca-del-cobre-meeting-with-the-raramuri
** https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/maidan-2014
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/bayou-coquille-louisiana
** https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-only-escape-is-a-dream
* https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/stinging-cassettes-java-bali
https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/sound-travels-in-babadag-romania
“That Fear
YES, IT'S ONLY that fear, those searchings, tracings, tellings whose
purpose is to hide the unreachable horizon. It's night again, and
everything departs, disappears, shrouded in black sky. I am alone and
must remember events, because the terror of the unending is upon me. The
soul dissolves in space like a drop in the sea, and I am too much a
coward to have faith in it, too old to accept its loss; I believe it is
only through the visible that we can know relief, only in the body of
the world that my body can find shelter. I would like to be buried in
all those places where I've been before and will be again...
-- Andrjez Stasiuk
This summer I finally reached a milestone in my travels, arriving at the city named in the title of Stasiuk’s book “On the Road to Babadag” – it was not
as far flung as the cities of Moldavia I had wanted, attmpted to reach this year
but all well and good enough. Spending time in Iași, even busking on the main drag,
left me with some Gitanic flavors of the region and, Iași, after all was
once part of the old state of Moldova. Still in a time amalgam outside of the modern swing.
“I never asked for a pure sound.” -- Stasiuk, again
These field recordings are perhaps as pure as I get however, without me even demanding it of myself. Recorded in the foothills and
meadows & forests in view of Babadag (= Father Mountain in Turkish)
between that citadel, the ancient Genoese Fortress of Enisala and a
village of the same name. On tippy toes at certain hillocks you can
catch glimpses of lakes Babadag and Razim on the horizon, which I took
at first to be the Black Sea itself, that same Black Sea as those
monopolizing Genoese merchants wanted to keep an eye of dominion
scanning over from that huge stone tower they built. Nearby is also a
Neolithic settlement under archeological investigation so efficiently
fenced-off we could not imagine any sneak-peak access. The old world
remains far away in half-life palpable mostly to professors.
This album spans my various modes, druthers, habits and of course
incorporates my flaws in technique despite the fact I have cleaned up my
act as much as possible. The first track is one of those attempts to be
in every dimension at once: the VLF radio puts my head in the
ionosphere, a ground wire catches electromagnetic earth charges as my
feet traverse dry grasses and the Zoom6 XY or the Audiotecnica shotgun
mic accumulate other sonic detail artifacts as I try to look into the
starry or cloudy sky convincing myself I can actually “hear” pulsars via
quantum entanglement with my body. I love this track in particular, no
matter what.
Recorded partly in the later evening of July 23 and periodically during
the day and early of July 24, the album follows time’s arrow. Therefore
some of it is fairly quiet. Not even crickets. And I didn’t do a thing
to make it more exciting than it is and there are surprises for which
the dear listener must wait. I do, however, during the course of the
last few tracks, engage my inner child via DX scanning the shortwave
bands while listening to late night insect concerti, campfire, winds,
owls and the Eurasian jackal yelps and those mysterious muted pooms in
the distance, artillery practice from army bases over the hills. There
is more Babadag material so there could be a sequel. Time will tell.
For Alice
Below you will find a poem that Alice Notley sent to me a few years ago when I was in the process of gathering material for a new journal that never got past experimental stagings. For the moment, I'm too shattered to say anything more than to put these few momentoes together. One of the poets I've read my whole lifetime and who always surprised and often confused me and tested every known and unknown boundary (see poem below for instance). You have to hear one of her poetry recitals from the last few years to get the whole picture of how she bridged into shamanism and declaimed verses with true bardic intensity and bubbling cauldron of mind. In our correspondence we talked a lot about dreams, lucid dreams, premonitions and clairvoyance as poetic resource.
Many will miss her and my condolences to Anselm & Edmund Berrigan and the extended family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Notley
You are human Shat-
in-between bodies of tered Dawn
this life. All the files seem to be ruptured, good. The
light, magenta and yellow won't cohere I can't remember
. . . the name of what I was calling these almost unstable isles
previously, sometimes cubicles, floating but
there are no strict geometric forms, here in
reality. Or lines of swastikas or star shapes
are you washed in the blood enough yet. You great
big beautiful doll, faceless and free. Accusations tre
mble, maybe you face fuckup. In transition winds
where cubicle crumbles. I know some people are dying. I break off
pieces. The room doesn't have to beg you not to leave it expands to
be big enough for your souls expands within and keeps
'we want you to know us a going
gain' is being said. You nev
er know who you'll bump in
to the white doves coo and crows
caw soft as
ghost caws
calling me
I what you all
call here made. You defend it
beckoning beyond a medical report
with air. How because you like waking
are you Pretty. up, really. Another of lily
Words don't sti he said Lily died last night
ck together she be did he I didn't write it down
speaks somehow say I can touch your centur
ing. We can float. I once ies here in an instant
dreamed I flew with Uncle holding it's the holdin
Taylor high high above the earth g that makes us souls
higher than an airplane or any O you're a strange god
thing next to wispy clouds would I go there still into the
you like to see my heart? Is it beloved action. Have you
broken she says. It stopped bleed always? I don't know. I
ing. Be that I can carry and now I'm don't know if anything stops
Hold the holder the gravity that Human suffering, though, is
is known as the expanse of Death. only one example of the
I am carrying you to freedom cosmos. Everyone has al
Are you the old man? I am the good ways been free but a
The part they don't get, is how it is d fraid to choose freedom
on't understand. Because from I hold you free you keep
Point Zero there are no Ways. choosing the pressure of
Like music can be any way. I bodies. I chose as a human
know she says Keep me com to slip through the micro-hole
fortable. I'm trying. You'll ne into the other mode I am as
ver leave. I always come back. everywhere. It is a beautiful day
Where will your head be. I have in the lace. grace palace. Your
heads everywhere. And me? You'll face is pretty and shining again
sort of have them everywhere too. (real words)
-- Alice Notley
Here's Alice reading from the book she gave to me in Paris in 2017 (picture below)
https://alicenotley.bandcamp.com/album/alice-notley-live-in-seattle
This is a link to a whittled down version of the 2017 interview I did with Alice and which was produced by Marjorie Van Halteren.The longer discussion is worth hearing and I will try to post that as soon as I find it in my archives. But I think it's 3 hours!
https://exchange.prx.org/pieces/316593?m=false
"What we need to do is explain to people that difficulty isn’t difficult."
-- from the Paris Review interview 2024
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/8263/the-art-of-poetry-no-116-alice-notley
 |
| Photo by Marjorie Van Halteren |
The Bridge of Many Shapes
(CD and Digital Release on Mahorka, June 2025)
The idea for the title came among many dream phrases on the night of November 11, 2024
"crossing the bridge of many shapes, we will meet again, when the months grow longer, discussions going on for weeks, the Hindu and the Muslim boys carry baskets of corn, any basic coverage is universal, the girl child leads an elephant, her hand held by the elephants trunk, in her other hand five roses, there is a kind of sheep with cobalt stripes, the mango pit once peeled turns out to be an almond"
This album is a dreaming of a Trans-Eurasian Balkan psycho-archeology by means of sound. Dreaming is meant here in terms of the songlines of Aboriginal Australians who while walking sing the tribal ancestor creature's dreaming into the geography of their own activity, communing with landscape, ghosts, spirit animals. This is an act of decolonization and a dissolving of the present moment and an entry into oneiric antiquity, an imaginary return to and travels within the homeland of my ancestors once adrift in the Cucuteni-Trypillian corridor. A shamanic journey in sound back through the mirror of the earth.
The aboriginal dreaming of the totemic spirit of the land however is not enough. My ancestors removed themselves from the corridor of Ukraine, Moldavia and Romania over a century ago, moving to the USA, while now my own soul has drifted back across the ocean, again inside the strange and weathered boat of my own body, searching out harbors. In this respect, I have been able to put wind in my sails and oars into the waters via the inspiration of two Carribean authors whose works trace the double life they led as people of Africa and people of the Americas. Kamu Braithwaite who charts inside his body of work the shared border of two continents ripped apart by geological time and yet experienced from both sides, after his people were forcibly carried from Africa to Barbados. While his life took shape on a distant island far from Africa his ancestral story comes from afar to an island that appears to him like a boat sailing not only ocean but dreamtime cosmos.
Guyanese writer Wilson Harris also traces an awesome asymmetry, living in many places and displaced from many, wandering in a body tossed by chance operations and historical impositions. "Mind has ancient sorrow it does not understand, fabrics of sorrow that reach through rational experience, Mind has sadness, joy, tragedy, comedy, interlaced in indescribable ways, Mind has vestiges of everything as it longs to return to the end and the beginning of things. It longs to return to a ground of truth, in which justice lives beyond all reasoning, absolute barriers. Mind longs to return in sacred ships, to the promise of wholeness on a distant shore which is still there when an age collapses. There is a ladder between the shore of earth and the Artist's painting. We are astonished to see there a curious solidity to grief painted in solid lines, a nervous solidity to joy..." -- from The Ghost of Memory
Among the Kogi people there is said to be a series of energy line between sacred places of resource and ritual in their seasonal life cycle. They too inspire me in the concept of an Eastern European and Balkan sense of songlines. See the bibliography for more in depth descriptions. Thanks for reading and listening to The Bridge of Many Shapes and thanks to Mahorka for making the CD happen
Bibliography
-- On the Kogi concept of dark energy pulsation threads -- Aluna -- an Ecological Warning by the Kogi People https://www.youtube.com/watch?
May 11
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| Light sculpts the day before eyes |
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| Portrait of the Heron's Eye |
https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/the-first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life
https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/first-day-of-the-rest-of-yr
Been a good run here since since the first posts while living in Berlin about Muslimgauze and interspecies comms in a dream travelogue wit...
