Things You Carry /  by James belflower

Earth Day reminded me of a wonderful graphic narrative by Vincent Stall I found lurking on the shelves at a record store in Denver, Colorado a few years ago: Things You Carry (2011). Published by 2D Cloud, an independent Xomics/comics press out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Things You Carry graphically portrays a wordless, faceless humanoid's quest for connection in an environment as vibrantly alive as it is. The character flows, morphs, and reconfigures its passage through a world on the edge of being overrun by unidentifiable fragments. But the character's quest sidesteps an overt doom and gloom commentary, because it seeks connection with both the astronaut it encounters and the similitude of its body to the gomi of its world.

One of the things I most enjoy about Things You Carry is Stall's transformation of the images and textures of the book into wooden form. In the video below, many of the prints in the book became acrylic paintings on rough particle board or 2X4 sculptures at an installation at CO Exhibitions. Stall's translation process from word to wood is a vivid meditation on vital materialism, and it poses an important question, "when we aestheticize our relationship with the planet, what is the difference between representing the vitality of matter and simply personifying it"? Much of the detritus in Things You Carry self-organizes throughout the book, assembling, reassembling, and proliferating through Stall's detailed sketches into humanoid and nonhuman configurations. The intimacy in these transformative relationships between human and nonhuman in Things You Carry helps me remember the uncanny, exciting, and impersonal moments when the world seems the most alien, and at the same time, the most immanent.

You can buy prints from Things You Carry here.

You can read an interview on Itchy Keen with Vincent Stall here.

You can purchase Things You Carry here.

A God In Drone /  by James belflower

When I think of the Old Testament the first thing that comes to mind is not rich, textured, drone music. However, AMULETS, the tape + electronics moniker of Austin based audio/visual artist Randall Taylor, crystallizes them beautifully. On his album The Old Testament, AMULETS repurposes Old Testament books on tape. So, if you spent much of your childhood punching play on various bible versions recorded on poor quality TDK or Maxell cassettes, then the stretched, looped, and collaged stories will melt into biblical soundscapes that not only bring to mind those moments but pleasantly subvert them. What I love about Old Testament is that there remains a god lurking in these warm sonic clouds, but it is not the angry, vengeful god the Old Testament leads us to expect. Instead, AMULETS finds a human heat in the ambient tape scrub, a viscous and sensuous cumulus of biblical proportions. Check it out and enjoy!

 

Find other AMULETS offerings here.

 

 

 

Echo Locution: Aural - Environment - Body - Poetics Part 3 /  by James belflower

Maryam Parhizkar, David James Miller, & James Belflower

At the Disembodied Poetics Conference: Writing/Thinking/Being at Naropa University, in October, 2014 David James Miller, Maryam Parhizkar, and myself discussed the influence of music on our critical and creative writing practices in a panel titled "Echo Locution: Aural / Environment / Body / Poetics." The conversation afterward was very rewarding and there were many questions about the various textual and musical sources referenced. To say thanks, and to keep that conversation going, we've posted a brief summary of our talks and a list of resources from our papers. This is the final installment in a three part series. We hope you enjoy!

Echo Locution

David James Miller

How might poetry of attuned attention function—connecting the deliberate act of listening inwardly to the self with listening outwardly to the environment? As in some experimental music, listening is somatic in such poetry, where one becomes open and receptive to dialogue between the self and the larger environment. Pauline Oliveros describes this as: “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds.” Her improvised, collective compositions (with Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis) perform such attuned attention deep in an empty, underground military reservoir 70 miles north of Seattle. Likewise, the music by Taku Sugimoto and other so-called ‘Onkyo’ musicians, performing at the Tokyo performance space Off-Site at the turn of the millennium, enact a similar listening experience. Emphasizing a “conscious recognition of the reverberation of sound (oto no hibiki)” (Plourde), their performances are often almost completely-silent, resulting in music of an interactive dynamic, highly attuned to tensions between the material, sonic performance and the unplanned sonic experiences from the immediate environment. This recalls, for me, John Cage's statement that “the sound experience I prefer to all others is the experience of silence... and the silence almost everywhere in the world now is traffic.” This also recalls writing by Leslie Scalapino and John Taggart—poets whose writing connects (the body of) the self and sound, with the body of the many social, political, spiritual, and psychological environments we inhabit.

Echo Locution: Aural - Environment - Body - Poetics Part 2 /  by James belflower

Maryam Parhizkar, David James Miller, & James Belflower

At the Disembodied Poetics Conference: Writing/Thinking/Being at Naropa University, in October, 2014 David James Miller, Maryam Parhizkar, and myself discussed the influence of music on our critical and creative writing practices in a panel titled "Echo Locution: Aural / Environment / Body / Poetics." The conversation afterward was very rewarding and there were many questions about the various textual and musical sources referenced. To say thanks, and to keep that conversation going, we've posted a brief summary of our talks and a list of resources from our papers. This is the second of three parts. We hope you enjoy!

Reckoning in the Feedback Loop: Some Notes on the Poetics of Transcendence/Transfiguration

Maryam Parhizkar

The feedback loop – in sonic terms, this is the event in which a produced sound, an output, is returned to the input, causing changes or modulations in the new output, but always being a continuous buildup of what came beforehand. I’m going to mangle with this idea a bit, figuring out ways in which the idea of this buildup – this coming back to oneself in a performative act that is of past, present and future at once – might be a way for us to think of how language, whether musical or textual, can be used, and what such a buildup might be working toward.... This project aims to transcend the restraints of the body, or, “the limits of body” to think in resonance Akilah Oliver’s question. In other words: how the loop can be an act of constant reckoning, especially for those who create and perform from the several variations of the margins. To transcend, or rise above, can require a change in the performing body – in other words, a transfiguration. How does a politics of transfiguration operate in this constant return?  The politics of transfiguration is what scholar Paul Gilroy describes in The Black Atlantic as the utopic intersection of politics and aesthetics in a “emergence of  qualitatively new desires, social relations, and modes of association,” working in a lower frequency,  “under the nose of the overseers.” My emphasis, in thinking of transfiguration within this context, is on the literalness of the word: trans/figura, the changing of the figure, or, here, the body. Transfiguration as possibility. To work in counterpoint with Akilah’s question: what are the possibilities of the body when the body becomes language or sound?

Echo Locution: Aural / Environment / Body / Poetics - Part 1 /  by James belflower

Maryam Parhizkar, David James Miller & James Belflower

At the Disembodied Poetics Conference: Writing/Thinking/Being at Naropa University, in October, 2014 David James Miller, Maryam Parhizkar, and myself discussed the influence of music on our critical and creative writing practices in a panel titled "Echo Locution: Aural / Environment / Body / Poetics." The conversation afterward was very rewarding and there were many questions about the various textual and musical sources referenced. To say thanks, and to keep that conversation going, we've posted a brief summary of our talks and a list of resources from our papers. This is the first of three parts. We hope you enjoy!

To Know Noise Is to Know Another: Luc Ferrari's Sound Newspaper Far West News

James Belflower

The Italian-born French composer Luc Ferrari was pivotal in the musique concrète scene emerging in Postwar France, which was characterized by the use of found sound, tape manipulations, and extended instrumentation. From one of his first found sound experiments in Danse Organiques (1971-73), which recorded two women making love, to his extended aural travelogue of he and his wife’s tour through the Southwest in the late 1990s, Far West News (1998-99), Ferrari provocatively pulled intimate noise into an historical period where abstract methods of music composition dominated the European and American scenes. In Far West News, Ferrari employs found sound, minimalist editing, and a variety of innovative compositional techniques to create a Sound Newspaper, a haunting "ambiguous realism" composed from recordings of his sightseeing tours, conversations, and ambient audio during their trip. Contrary to the alienation noise typically provokes, Far West News suggests that an encounter with noise is instead a form of communication rich with intimacy. Ferrari's meticulous, sensitive, and hands-on approach to collecting and composing with found sound demonstrates that when we consider noise as deeply relational it allows us to practice non-referential and comparitivist approaches to reality through our senses. Ultimately, noisy encounters encourage us to understand how resonances of all varieties inflect materiality by engendering sonic affinities between human and non-human players in what Ferrari called the "dialectics of the everyday."

Microclimate Review: Che by Matthew Klane /  by James belflower

All text from Che by Matthew Klane, Stockport Flats 2013

 

                    Original cover art: Matthew Klane

Tag clouds are designed to show the frequency of word usage in a text by enlarging words based on how many times they occur. Microclimate Reviews, however, are hand-selected tag clouds that operate like weather systems, turbulent and resonate across the text. Frequency therefore becomes a microclimate in which one’s personal selection intuits a visual and spatial map of the verbal atmospheres entangled in the pages.

Matthew Klane is co-editor at Flim Forum Press. His books include B (Stockport Flats, 2008) and Che (Stockport Flats, 2013). An e-chap, from Of the Day, has recently been published by Delete Press (deletepress.org). Other new work can be found in Horse Less Review, Lit, Harp & Altar, and word for / word. He currently lives and writes in Albany, NY, where he co-curates the Yes! Poetry & Performance Series and teaches at Russell Sage College. See: matthewklane.blogspot.com. 

http://matthewklane.blogspot.com

Microclimate Review: My God Is This a Man by Laura Sims /  by James belflower

All text from My God Is This a Man by Laura Sims, Fence Books 2014

 

 Original cover art for My God Is This is Man by Alessandro Guttenberg

Tag clouds are designed to show the frequency of word usage in a text by enlarging words based on how many times they occur. Microclimate Reviews, however, are hand-selected tag clouds that operate like weather systems, turbulent and resonate across the text. Frequency therefore becomes a microclimate in which one’s personal selection intuits a visual and spatial map of the verbal atmospheres entangled in the pages.

Laura Sims is the author of three books of poetry: My god is this a man, Stranger, and Practice, Restraint (Fence Books); her fourth collection, Staying Alive, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2016. She edited  Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson, a book of her correspondence with the celebrated experimental novelist (powerHouse Books), and has also published five chapbooks of poetry.  Her work was included in the anthology, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, and individual poems have recently appeared in the journals:  Aufgabe, Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Crayon, and Denver Quarterly. She has published book reviews and essays in Boston Review, Evening Will Come, Jacket, New England Review, Rain Taxi and The Review of Contemporary Fiction.

Sims’s first book, Practice, Restraint, was awarded the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize, and in 2006, she received a JUSFC Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship to live in Tokyo. Sims is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. She received a Master of Fine Arts from University of Washington in 2000, and she is now an adjunct professor of creative writing and literature at NYU-SCPS. She has been a featured writer for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, and has been a co-editor of Instance Press with poets Elizabeth Robinson, Susanne Dyckman, and Beth Anderson since 2009. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.

Abner Jay: Sexuality in a Different Key /  by James belflower

Abner Jay courtesy of Charlie Vinz

Abner Jay courtesy of Charlie Vinz

Walter Benjamin said that there is no better trigger for thinking than laughter. Abner Jay, the self-proclaimed "last working southern black minstrel," takes this to heart on his album One Man Band when he asks such urgent questions as "What do you give an elephant with diarrhea? Answer, plenty of room!" Giggling at the moral ruts we often find ourselves in, Abner alternates short immoral anecdotes and one-liners about suicide by train, marriage, child rearing, venereal disease, The Vietnam War, Australia, rock n' roll, virility pills, bestiality, military history, cocaine use, along with jokes that both reinforce and swerve to critique the sexual assumptions they chew on. What I love about One Man Band is that although it is not quite in the goofy exotica genre, it maintains a comic drift between the sexual repression and the hyper sexism often associated with bible thumping movements. His scope of innuendo is impressive, but it is the odd and poetic stories between songs that trigger a downright awkward but self-reflexive chuckle, amplified by his bluesy bends.

Three highlights from this album: VD, I'm A Hard Working Man, and Wee Wee. VD is hilariously contaminated with the dangers of the "pre-honeymoon" in Abner's  impassioned diatribe against the dangers of sex before marriage. I'm A Hard Working Man grunts its way through a fusion of blues and eroticism (I'm still unsure which), and Wee Wee finishes by crooning us back to those wonderful days when urination was a pleasure in itself.

In the extended vein of early self-titled Scott Walker recordings and The Frogs' Made Up Songs, the iconoclastic Abner Jay is a performer who implicitly and explicitly mocks himself, along with poking at the normativity of male heterosexuality. Plucking, thumping, and inveighing, his humor and music provoke laughter as the initial stage of critique. He causes us to reconsider what can be done about those "TUUUUUUUURRRRRRRIBLE things" that may happen when you're caught "putting your things together!"

See more biographical information about Abner Jay here.

The Last Ole Minstrel Abner Jay plays his last gig at the Grassroots Festival in Trumansburg, New York.