Queen Mab: Machine Mantra in Homage to the Working Class and Gordan Mumma

Queen Mab is a machine-based mantra in homage to the working class tradition and Gordon Mumma. I'd been reading Shelley and Douglas Kahn's Earth Sound, Earth Signal when the materials coalesced. These are very strong waves in low frequency spectrum and you will have a better experience with stand alone speakers, adjusting to your preferred volume level. 

 Listen to the track here

https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/queen-mab-for-gordon-mumma

"He was animated to greater zeal by compassion for his fellow-creatures. His sympathy was excited by the misery with which the world is bursting. He witnessed the sufferings of the poor, and was aware of the evils of ignorance. He desired to induce every rich man to despoil himself of superfluity, and to create a brotherhood of property and service, and was ready to be the first to lay down the advantages of his birth. He was of too uncompromising a disposition to join any party. He did not in his youth look forward to gradual improvement: nay, in those days of intolerance, now almost forgotten, it seemed as easy to look forward to the sort of millennium of freedom and brotherhood, which he thought the proper state of mankind, as to the present reign of moderation and improvement. Ill health made him believe that his race would soon be run; that a year or two was all he had of life. He desired that these years should be useful and illustrious. He saw, in a fervent call on his fellow-creatures to share alike the blessings of the creation, to love and serve each other, the noblest work that life and time permitted him. In this spirit he composed Queen Mab."
 -- P.B. Shelley

 "Sound” allowed Mumma mobility between literature, theater, and music, and his DIY abilities opened new possibilities in compositional practice and live electronic music. He could modify anything and construct “instruments that had no cultural precedence.” He recalls, “I had no—this is important—no cultural precedence imposing upon me to make sounds or music or whatever.” In the late-1950s, there were not very many musical works to emulate, even if he had wished to do so. “I had no repertory except my own,” he says. This no doubt freed him to compose music from among the sounds of his daily life that, in the early 1960s, happened to be the laboratory sounds of earthquakes and underground nuclear explosions he encountered at his day job.
-- Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound, Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts

Conspiracy Therapists. In the Place of a Vain Search for an Image of the Age. New album release on Mahorka Records and a review

conspiracy spider (recently rediscovered older version of the album art)

First of all, have a listen.  

https://mahorka.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-place-of-a-vain-search-for-an-image-of-the-age

 My Introduction

The title for the album links back to that year (or years) when many iconic figures of music and art seemed to be dying one day after another. Twilight of the idols, playing on repeat. For many, the frame of the world was lost while for others it was merely shifting. Perhaps I felt this was only a creative energy recycling moment. I didn't take the losses personally, in a familial sense. But that a generation was passing into memory and maybe no longer a guiding light for us until we find the lantern has been given into our own hands. Better look around. In my attempt not to drop it and even without knowing what way there was to be shown, I staggered forward with the title. 
Filippo accepted the title for the track which later became the title for the the album. 

"In the Place of a Vain Search for an Image of the Age"

is first of all about continuity for me. Yet it's an album concerned with transitions. 

Shortly after the first track was recorded, my laptop, and therefore my processing environment -- which gave the unique character to the  "The Watermark", "Visitations" -- became unusable. After recording "I am sitting in a room, performing the society of the spectacle," we also lost our flat in Wilda quarter of Poznan, which had served as my home studio. I attempted relocation to Ireland, which failed. My effort to create a new rap-style came forward in notes I made while walking in the mornings those last days in Wilda, an attempt to scry the detritus of the streets, pure description, commentary on the darkness and uncertainty. 
The allusion to Alvin Lucier's process composition and Guy Debord manifested for me other signs of a shift in the image of the illusory transcendentalism of the arts themselves (I speak mainly for myself, for Conspiracy Therapists is a duet, but we are both free-thinkers and live and change our minds when thinking upgrades). 

While some of us may disappear into a shimmery blur or anonymous murmur of room resonance in a gallery or art space in the white cube world of colonialist squatters, the majority of the people remain fixed in a world that the ecopaths "create"

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath

Most of us are left trying to clean up, cope:  resisting falling socially to pieces, deforested, drifting into the "hothouse earth" position due to the unchecked carbon emissions and all the while the stubbornness of gamester politicians and pundits and jet-setters, goes on bringing species depletion, virus-jumps, an all too human level of objective misery for people who were not born into the richest percentile of the the population. 

"I am sitting in room performing the society of the spectacle" 

is a song about lockdown into the social media, the inability to disappear or escape, the stubborness of the literal world and Filippo's field recording of a man crying "solo voglio dormire" seems to attest to this strange existential insomnia. 

The final piece "In the Most Unlikely of Places" includes field recordings and acousmatic material from Wilda, Poznan my time in Ireland, some travels in Bulgaria, grappling with a new transitional living environment in one of the noisiest places I've ever lived (thankfully behind us now). Altogether this album spans 3 or maybe more years of work and the meeting of my world and Filippo Panichi's in a world between worlds that unfolds through the visceral movement of sounds. 

Many thanks to Ivo Petrov and Mahorka for helping us transmit the signals to you the listeners.

Don't hesitate to check out the other artists on this wild & wise label

http://mahorka.org/release/246 

And Finally

Here's a review by Disquiet Junto's Marc Weidenbaum

link below

https://disquiet.com/2020/06/28/current-listens-filmic-exploration-hyperspeed-pummel/?fbclid=IwAR1kktsZIVp0N4N8VRc6JQtSBfHKAfYYnxyCdDbchGgvDDjtbNA3Cxb8boc 

as if you were already in harmony with nature

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/as-if-you-were-already-in-harmony-with-nature

I didn't really know you very well, maybe not at all but that doesn't mean I don't care. It's beginning to look doomy all over this many-textured globe, extracted & ailing. Mustard gaseous skies & hourly hail. Soon none of this will exist or will become unrecognizable. Eyes will look out but mind will go blank. Who are we? What have we done? Even if you could come back you wouldn't know where to go to begin your new journey.

That blown over stand of hills, ridges gone, ripple of sand, shaking hands. I wander like a wobbly clock in an irregular circle in the landscape of identity. Buildings falling, rising, ponds filled, trees felled, concrete poured, concrete broken. Look at the lone wild weed proudly vertical shooting through the crack in the side-walk. You again? Here? Why?

I'd like to revert to the old century and finish the poem I was writing in the California redwoods. I'd like them to have all their lands back and let the leaves close the curtains on my tracks. I'd take one step back and say, hello, is anybody at home?

All my life I've been traveling backward in time. The numbers add up, true. There's accumulation, yes, from a certain point. But even beyond that there is no beginning.

What on earth are you talking about?

The trees way of walking was to slowly send out roots and branches.

There was a secret being shared with everyone who would keep the secret.

Sacred. Cyclorama.

Eventually our marriage became a caravan. It took ages to grow the wheels which at first made so much noise the deer fled. Then they got used to it. Mere movement meant them no harm. In the eyes of the fawn I saw my own selfless self. Eating flowers.

Why do you want to be so unconcealed? So unconcealing?

In the city down there somewhere already one heard murmurs, rumors, hisses, muffled voices, slamming doors, sirens, trains, trucks, tirades. Chains of reasons people made.

I check the box but I never read the user's agreement. I've gotten used to triple, quadruple-takes.
And I still don't know what I am or what I am seeing. Only that I see.

(TBC)

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/as-if-you-were-already-in-harmony-with-nature

This new album was recorded spontaneously a few days ago and in part responds to the passing of Marc Orleans, a guitarist I barely knew.  I play prepared acoustic guitar. There is a juxtaposition between the inside of the music and the environmental sounds and this is why you should listen in a quiet environment. There are some deliberately harsh sounds that function as signs of the situation of human crisis with and within the natural world, as the title suggests. Thank you for your support.

Black Floyd (Davu Seru & Jeff Gburek)

For me on this end it's not easy being whitey on the moon in ghost town picking through memory skeletons of the holocaust nobody else sees. Hard to swim in local lakes knowing what went into tombstone maculate the eerie bottoms (search in this blog Rusalka water-walk, read if you care). If that isn't enough, the constant expansion of booty negritude on the virtual vevo vice channels in the received post-afro-futurism, where all the sweat and labor is off stage, sacrificed for the visual cannibals, leaves me troubled: when I think over the musical heritage of the USA where I cut my teeth doing anything (almost) and yet, it's easier to see, when I log into the news, the boot or knee or bullet on the neck on somebody whose ancestors served in the unconscripted armies of slaves that built the wealth of all nations*, well, it's enough. I'd even forgotten Big Floyd (of the Screw Tang clan) was the man down. When 8:46 it the stands, it was domino effective. Somehow that's how this album all got done so quickly. Energy from where it's taken. Entropy from where it's taken. 

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/black-floyd-jeff-gburek-davu-seru

Davu's Intro went this way...

 "Jeff Gburek lives in Poland but we first met in Boulder, CO, back in 2001 or 2. I was touring the bo-ho improvised music territory with some percussion instruments, beer and cigarettes.

I joined FB in 2008 when I was working a desk job in publishing and soon with family to worry about. In Saint Paul, MN. That's about when Jeff and I said hi again.

Despite the impression management scheme that social media infects us all with, I have admired Jeff from afar and am inspired by his integrity--you might even call him an artist. It is an honor to have made my favorite recording to date...with him...and Black Floyd.

You can begin to know me better here:

davuseru.com

In place of live performance, I have taken--for the first time--to multi-tracking.

Jeff submitted solo tracks via email, I listened for the lure, then bit. And then walked away to my garden where I would listen for it to dig and settle.

After deciding which instruments that I wanted to prepare (after interpreting the call) I set up the studio and improvised wearing headphones. Despite these being multi-track recordings,
I played with the consideration that I might someday be invited to perform the pieces; and, so, I limited my activity to something I might approximate live. The instruments include: drum set, glockenspiel (bowed and struck), 28" bass drum and voice.

All tracks were recorded at home directly to free software using a $40 USB microphone. Along with a little reverb, the silences that interrupt the drum set on "Breathing Gatha" are the only post-production edits.

--Davu Seru, June, 9, 2020 

But let the tale unfold further, before, after, while you listen, where Davu also explains the album's cover art, in the writing and photos at this link

 davuseru.com/2020/06/15/preview-black-floyd-akashic-records-2020/


 While Davu Serus lives in Minneapolis, USA and we met I'm pretty sure in Boulder in the drive-gates of Jack Wright's home in 2001 where I and Ephia Gburek had been hosted en route to New Mexico. I had quit smoking for the 3rd time by then.
  We noticed somewhere along the time-line shared passions for music, literature, an affinity for the queer turns of phrase that sign one's taste for the marginal & rebellious use of language one has to call poetic. My take, anyway. For the last few years there was always some speculation we'd wind up again on the same continent & share a stage. This year the speculation took a turn for the 99.999 percentile of extreme improbability with the panic of pandemic overwhelm. So we have hit the virtual pavement and mingled our composition and improvisation skill sets, wound up with this album.

 I played the Hoeffner electric guitar and the Microfreak synthesizer, simultaneously (no dubs) for an hour and sent a bundle of this to Davu who added via audacity (software) his drum & voice overdubbed in whatever order he knows better than I. That this order is the way the music falls together so quickly seems happy enough on its own and yet perhaps owes something to the urgency of the times. As my friend pointed out, we might say, we created something to celebrate, extra.
I should like to confess that while recording I projected myself out of my body. Had a change of shirt after getting back inside. Uneasy. The birth of the the album with the project named Black Floyd has a bitter root. But the cooperation heals and joins hands & let's us imagine something else

Wheels of Sound among the Yungdrung Bön

 Once again Transparent Abelard is blessed through the agency of Michael Northam with a gem in the realm of textures, textiles, twinkling on the dharma path, coming into view from the very compelling Nine Ways site of Raven Cypress Wood, link below

Called a wheel of sound it appears to me like a cross-world puzzle, a pan-acrostic, a work of concrete poetry, the Mongol calligrammes of an even more painterly Apollinaire, the himalyan gematria...

"Within the Yungdrung Bön religious tradition there is a style of poetry that is considered an advanced art and is often used to praise spiritual masters or states of realization. The poetic verse is written in a kind of graph in which each syllable is written within its own geometric space often in contrasting colors that form patterns or images. These syllables then intersect with other lines of poetry or verse. The arrangement of syllables must be made in such a way that they must make sense with each intersecting syllable."

https://ravencypresswood.com/2020/05/23/dra-khor-a-wheel-of-sound/?fbclid=IwAR3S4yZZo93kO6gHqAlyAwGlHyfsM-l2dRfzWZqL45RLNkqV167eSujcuUs

Lines Written in Trieste, 1992

"we ourselves intensify that resistance which the "obvious" has
to every demand made by that which is questionable"  -- heidegger

photo thanks to john elmanahi, great friend of life's ways

a poem facing all four winds at once, these whirlings

speaking through the wood of Miramare with tingled tongues

with doves & pigeons & rocks the language melted

trees hooting in the bachelor's cave-pad

winding thought's string out from the fisherman's reel

into the labyrinth of the spikily-ceiled tunnels

or tying thoughts string to a sinking stone

winding around a sore-thumb stuck out on the ledge

Adriatic life-line blue infinite turquoise

green shallows clear white flat sea bottom

rocks stare up from swooped by ivory

winged gulls if not terns whose pinion-tips

dip into the surface slicing small trails

in the mild undulation of watery (crossed out)

sea moss blue-black urchin world

& greener moss & brown yellow-trimmed

umber cliffs jagged up to the blinding white castle

timeless clash of red burnt maple leaf against

whittle down rocks of the sea, buoys, etc

white smooth of the castle blinding white

with the kelpy hanging residue & otherness junks

it's a sandwich they eat, notebook laid

carelessly on the balustrade edge over-looking

already written about stuffs above here, look!

read again to this point, don't give up

no end to the wind is in sight

and widely spead about it's invisibility

the sensing body somewhere robed in uncertain flesh

gently ripples broken on the edge

of consciousness whetted (wedded)

with the aqua pura, chiara, pale skies

on which the sea cloud bears the sun

turn and find behind Palazzo Hotel Adriatico

the bronze god his or her hand uplifted always

some sadhu in green patina but the blazing god

hands drawn in the white-heat drawn into his bosom

lost child lost mother there all blossoms

and a prism planted in the solar plexus

while in the parking lot a laughing father

plays at dumping the laughing son

into the trash bin while silent gulchs in whom

the trees bend waving and all about seems happy

flutter doves again, the armillary sphere,

Our Lady of Adrenal Metempsychosis

wind and water woven throughout

Flying Rivers: George Christian & Jeff Gburek

Listen here:

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/flying-rivers

Flying Rivers refers to the vaporization canopy of the Amazonian rain-forest, an eco-system whose loss contributes in part to global climate change. The album began to take shape in the era when deregulation of clearing the rain-forest began to take place, burning out territories of the forest in order to transform them into agricultural tracts, timber, while displacing plant, animal and indigenous human populations. The music spans several months of exchanges of sound-files and over-dubbing, a trans-oceanic correspondence campaign.

George Christian lives in Stella Maris quarter of Salvador, the capital of Bahia province in Brazil.  Jeff Gburek is based in Poznan, Poland while the bulk of his instrumental tracks were recorded in Bulgaria in the summer of 2019. The album was finished over the course of 2019-2020 and therefore encompasses almost a full year of deliberation, processing, labor and thought. There is a constant play between traditions, innovations and references to transitions in cultural-historical time are registered on many levels, perhaps most consciously in their Homage to João Gilberto who passed away in July, 2019. Further evidence of cultural and ecological sharing can be found in the "Trial by Fires" track where we hear free saxophonist Thelmo Cristovam and later when we hear in the soundscape entitled "Amazonas" some of Thelmo Cristovam's Mamori Lake field recordings which supply the cantus firmus, so to speak, over which play the voices speaking Portuguese of Ana Kavalis  (Cuba/Berlin), Cristina Ferreira (Poznan/ Porto, Portugal) , Denize Mota (Poznan/ Manaus, Brazil).

 Instrumentation

George Christian: voice, Ibanez V72 acoustic guitar, Brazilian telecaster, pedals, found objects.

Jeff Gburek: voice, Gilmore acoustic guitar, Hoefner electric, ebow, percussion, samples and field recordings.

Thelmo Cristovam: saxophone (7) & field recordings (9).

Ana Kavalis, Cristina Ferreia, Denize Mota: voices (9) 

Produced and mixed by Jeff Gburek

The text recited in Amazonas is a spectral ghost poem resulting from lines written in English by Jeff Gburek which were then translated into Brazilian Portuguese by George Christian. Our chorus giving fleshly voice to the poetry are a mixture of native speakers of Portuguese and a Cubana who has traveled among the Brazilians extensively. Many thanks, gracias, obrigados to all collaborators and dziękuję to Karolina Ossowska once again for the cover art from her quickly expanding collagist's oeuvre.

-- Jeff Gburek 

 "I want to send my thanks to the opportunity of this partnership with you, Jeff, to all the other participants who made this album really possible. And I want to dedicate this album to the free spirits that are still striving to survive, facing the lockdown of those turbulent times we're living on Earth.
Remembering now that, unfortunately, Brazilian indigenous people are dying not only because of the miners and the agrobusiness people, but now also of COVID-19... Let's pray for their survival."

-- George Christian 

https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/flying-rivers