this is not china (on the passing of thich nhat hanh)

impersonal poem which began being 

about my cell phone...

 

a simple walk with open eyes and the device that sends 

chinese corporations all my personal data

my personal data is huge, expanding all the time

my personal data is conflation, inflation, apnea, all at once. my personal data is a blue algea pharmaceutical concern belching covid variants and bootleg bloodstreams. my data convolution programs spam snails for boring parameters and we consider ship-worms a possible anti-colonialist anti-slavery strategy of an ally or an alloy gripped by diamond sutra white dwarves emitting teslic or testical coils. 

 

blessings pour down ripples of accidentally surreal raincoats

part of my personal data is dedicated to the insane art of never repeating oneself, itself 

and therefore watching everything slowly at the accelerating rate of mindfulness. 

 

thank you thich nhat hanh for reminding me 

       by dying at 95 today

 

reminding how scattered dying might be, how integral

 

i walk the line within these words with open eyes, unblinded by death, depth

 

   in minneapolis or some city up there where 

davu seru's ancients wound up

thich nhat hanh went on the walking meditation 

the I who am nobody do daily

thanks to him or whoever blessed these feet

 

and the car stopped thich nhat hanh 

and the voice said, this is not china!

 

forced to agree, he walked on

Jan.22.22, Poznan

Ode on the Experimental Muses. Reclaiming the Dignity of the Experimental in Music and Art.---- Opening Statement ;)

  

 Inspired by the convocation of George Christian's new podcast "Escutas Experimentais," 

I prepared a brief statement for him but then extended the idea into this short talk for my youtube channel.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDinnAGvFvw

The idea that art and music were akin to, concerned with the exploration of metaphoric "terras incognitas", a place where star trekkers had gone not before. This is what comes to mind when I think of experimental music. That and how experimental became disparaged as inconclusive or too open to be substantial and how very wrong this is. For it is the close-minded world of consumerism and conservatism alone that forces us into conformity and genre and empty concepts of quality. What I'd wanted to do in poetry and music was to catch up with the actual world. Experimental is not academic. Experimental is radical and can be calm and reassuring as a gentle rain in the forest during summer or a cyclone disrupting space and time. Experimental music engages chaos and natural forces. Experimental music improvises and invents. Experimental music is clear and propositional. Experimental music involves one, two, three or more players, orchestras, species and states of matter. Experimental music is without precedent quite often and appears to be alien and unruly but experimental music has a history and great traditions. Shamans were experimental musicians.

 The tape music of John Cage and Pauline Oliveros and the statistical modeling adopted by Xenakis to further dilate & explode serialism into pure sounds, the acousmatic works of Pierre Henry, Schaefer, orchestrating noise, blending energy fields of lysergic acoustic ecology, of deep listening strategies, the advent of field recording devices which allow almost anyone to make music concrete. Experimental music is you and your life. It belongs not to corporations, not to governments nor schools nor cliques nor elites. In the digital era or what is called the microsound aspect of granular synthesis, in glitch, one can view ever smaller fractal versions of the cosmos. Experimental space travel in sound. Thank you Sun Ra. Experimental means to experience. Thank you tape recorders and dictaphones: re-listen to experience and enter into the laminal planes of somatic and geological time. The fascination with ancient modes, archaic instruments, ethnic forgery, old skool, trap, Africa, polyrhytmia, Indonesia, microtones, aboriginal, experi-mental. Experiment is dream time, dream incarnate. 

Jeff Gburek 25/11/2021

 

 

 

 

 

Framework Radio Podcast #778 featuring works from my Bulgaria Sound Specific album.

   Framework Radio podcast #778, featuring some of the pieces from my Bulgaria Sound Specific album, is now online. Curated and produced by Patrick Tubin McGinly, amid some familiar phonographers such as Tomáš Senkyřík and sound artists whose works I will soon be getting to know. Especially happy to appear in a playlist with Eric La Casa whose work impacted my own so positively early on. Buon ascolto!

https://frameworkradio.net/2021/11/778-2021-11-21/ 

 photos from autumnal Poznan

 

 

Bulgaria Sound Specific: Four New Tracks

     I have just updated the album of field recordings and related soundscape compositions with 4 new tracks. One recorded on the Black Sea, Irakli in 2018: ney and drum music around a campfire tangling with gentle rage of waves. Two raw recordings of a villager in Belovo named Angelina as she sings an incantation for rain (some of us think) in Romany and or Turkish (we think), blended with the murmur of doves, other local birds, village life getting by in late August. Proceeds for these will go to Angelina and her people. Last is the piece I created for the Electro-Acoustical Poetical Society's podcast. "Permanent Arrival" contemplates the theme of being unable to go home and the arrival in music, song, art, the reconciliation with a home within one's own body, ancestry and self-creation of all of them in the course of one's life. It also bears witness to the life of the Roma who teach me to stay put traveling and go far while sitting in the middle of nowhere, whoever I am. 

 

  All tracks can be downloaded individually but the real winner is the complete album purchase with the streaming possibility and the you can select which tracks you like to hear the most out of the wide variety of sound tapestries created in Bulgaria over the last 3 trips.

   Each track has it's own detailed description in the notes section of each track so I remind you to check out the notes which tend to get over-looked or undiscovered.  

 

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/bulgaria-sound-specific

 

 

 

 

"Still Between Worlds": poem cycle written december 29, 2020

 

Painting by Thibault Delferiere

 

 

still between worlds

  י

 

having become human

passing through the animal

as these words do

through your eyes

plant prism mineral,

seeking enlightenment (without bother)

I go and I stay

shifting from plane to plane...

nothing about us absolute

everything wild and tame, fearless

I don't really want to write anything.

just first become human,

then seek enlightenment

causes of firstness preceding

times and history

accumulate in the landscape

and inside the body.

I am layered, time crystal

brittle, soft, hard, smooth

my breasts stand out

rough in some regions

what more have you been holding back?

not writing to be final

just trying to live here

my failure for you is success

in another dimension

collapse is order in the making

 

+

 

ectoplasm on the run

ejectamenta of the sun

the hope you carried forth with that gleam in your smile

where ever it follows you forever without body

this volume borrowed, returned to nature's library, unread,

unfinished, waiting, filed, lunar

the envelope doesn't have any name on it

we have to teach you who you are

but we can't keep you tied to that

endless wave, endless summer,

endless winter, deeper

repopulation where I see you wander

and like the mallards

timing their exodus

through the uprights of the great oak & the gingko

shiva's horns, the Y, timed release

their simple airport pond

destiny: the next black-hole

where we will meet again

 

+

 

dropping out is what we do (best)

every once in a blue asteroid

the book is only something to display the quality of a mind

datafications, info-materia, algorithms

implant fibulation, theophanic mobbing

they will manufacture new immunology

we will grow apart, flung

bones reconfigured, new bouquets, crowns

rippling from under permafrost

our fadeless particles

our perfect water

 

+

 

the way the world sounds be like

"I don't like myself very much

so I can't relate to you directly"

(writing in the dark, scratch piano)

there is a miniscule daub of angel

scurrying light, dolphin sylph

pollywog wiggling through these words

like a stuttering yod replicant

carries the grain-bug of the truth

that bothers me honestly

until the light goes out

and the dark comes on

 

the tree inside the moon

sending tentacles

  or down the particle chain

electrical

 

+

the flowers somewhere and their buddy system

spring eternal, maybe not for me

but what does it depend on?

hare kare quite contrary

getting a beyond for this techno-crapitalist mindset

the king of things hung up like a sail

(mapped traditions, lore, decoded)

the mother of all wounds

(eating means to be eaten)

furbish the tree, praise

regard and upload fecundity

don't worry about form

happy endings are bad

bad endings are good beginnings

leave it incomplete

 

the world's weather

tethered together, not

it's knot a not

left the untangling

giving way

 

Writng & Literacy may not be the Measure of All Things: Africa Writes Back: The Libyc-Numidian Script

 

Africa writes back

European ideas of African illiteracy are persistent, prejudiced and, as the story of Libyc script shows, entirely wrong

 https://aeon.co/essays/africas-ancient-scripts-counter-european-ideas-of-literacy?fbclid=IwAR067SQYJv_HRWPWTFY3fuC8qJT1B1-HG1UAILPlCHnA9maVjvtDtyq9ezs

 "But Bourdieu’s observational mistake – the idea that the Kabyle weren’t literate – is actually not his most consequential misapprehension. That would be the idea that literacy is a supreme cognitive and cultural achievement. It’s one of the means by which universities shore up the value of their intellectual work – they police grammar, philology, literacy – in short, they define and champion rigour and ‘standards’. For those of us brought up within that system – even brought up, as I was, in a former colony (Kenya) – those standards might appear to be value-neutral. But they’re value-neutral only because they annihilate even the possibility of other values, of other modes of thinking or being. When Bourdieu went from the elite École Normale Supérieure to a Kabyle settlement, he saw, ultimately, the absence of what made the university, and his own mind, what it was. That supposed absence is the product of intellectual arrogance, yes, but it’s also part of a European cultural heritage"

Songs Out of the Head of Papusza

 

Gili

 the little song, the diamond, a poem-song 

adapted from the Polish Romany of Papusza

with the assistance of Karolina Ossowska.

 Papusza's often improvised lyrics were transcribed 

during the final moments of the experience of the 

tabor culture and her name in Romany means "doll" 

& she speaks not of poems but of 

"songs out of the head of Papusza"

the locution used is familiar, often, that is,

"a person" is called "a gypsy" -- as if to say,

"one of our human family". 

the forest girls are going into

the forest, the Gypsy girls

young & pretty 

as blackberries

going into the forest, 

the forest girls, singing

we would like to wear earrings

golden ones,

all the while their eyes go shining

like true gold

the teeth white like pearls

little Gypsy girls singing

pretty as blackberries

where are those earrings?

have those earrings flown

into the forest?

& will none of the city-smiths

here forge

earrings of gold?

will no one make

earrings for them?

they run, calling

 "great golden earrings!

great golden earrings!

where are you today"?

my black eyes are looking for them

in the darkness now

 & the fires almost gone

ah, wind don't blow

so fiercely... please, don't blow...

and still the songs grow

 ever more silent

while the forest

more silent

took their songs

off into the world

& brought them back again

 & whenever the oak leaf falls

on the girls' knees

the Gypsy girls

 with eyes of true gold

fall upon the oak's leaves

on their knees & they run, crying:

we will make of golden

oak-leaves

our earrings

shining like diamonds

and she makes the oaken leaves

their golden earrings

which they sing about

in turns