About this blog

As a theorist of diverse poetic forms, I am interested in articulating the complex, dynamic sensuality that manifests in experimental sound. In 2007, I began formulating a preliminary philosophical position on this topic, working mostly from Deleuze, Derrida and Kristeva. I created this blog to track and share my spontaneous responses to performed experimental music and sound art, in order to (hopefully) complement my theoretical perspective on what happens when we feel, evoke, or represent using sound.

Jacques Demierre and Vincent Barras, "Voicing through Saussure," voice, Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago, 4/23/11

hothouse earthquake of the tongue.
tremor tremor simulated
story of how speech destroyed the world.
hot gases emerging steaming in between
consonental
continents-en-procès.
vowels sharpened on the tongue
true taste of the construction of the sibilancial gas that cracked the earth.
team palatal drilling, method-quaking,
breathing space into edge-border to
construct collapse his langue through method-rent parole.

boulders roll between their lips
crushing air liquified body in
what we used to call by the name "pain."

making nauseous love with their turned-gueules,
too much comes out to remain human,
the linguistic community has become
the bulimic community,
vomiting air to make room for impressions of fragmentary signs.
voicing replaces breath, narrates
the incipient earthquake.

[break]

stretching body-skin to certain points of sick exhausted
exhale-tation.
geometric sound concatenations
retching sire abdom-abominations
quaking down the gutters of
heretofore known structuration
to slink, scream, slink along the sputter-surface
they have left us us in their wake.
upheave, uprise, outrun the
state-lines of comprehensibility
pulling their subjects round by each ones uvula, we are herded into rowboats
and cast out upon the sea,
each one rocks, retches, heaves,
the sea itself has lost its rhythm
leaving us no standard of integrity.
bodies half inside-out, yanked from that
center to obliterate that very center,
we hang-over boat-sides,
convulsing in unmeaning.

the quaking of the tideless sea
overturns each rowboat, one by flesh-filled one.
our uvulas commence the task of
marine navigation.
lungs, twitch, sputter,
fill and hence the artists formerly known as
linguistic subjects commence the
task of learning to breathe underwater.
sobbing, shaking, we gasp, hiss,
inhale slips of this tongue-torn ocean.
absorbing it, it absorbs us, our bodies,
along with any remaining sense.

in
out
in
outin
out
inout
a singular
an iterative
an experience of becoming
of de-"terre"-itorialization.

those that can find rhythm in drowning
form the first strains of a new poetry.

Elizabeth Harnik (piano) and Kent Kessler (upright bass), Michael Zerang (percussion), Hideout, Chicago, 8/25/10

1. A drone in bits and starts-- a bee, half-drunk with nectar, struggling to get all feet stuck to a porous surface. One wing, beats again now, its body sighs, it beats the other wing, a flutter, sticky but distinct, it lifts and drops each sharpened leg, a buzzed percussive flight-check coming loose, coming together as we hoist ourselves, tottering, into air. Weaving up and down and past these frequencies of sky, slow distillation without purification-- a fragmented self-mobilization. Terror of the airwaves now its wings percuss whatever sky it moves through, sending pulses every which way as it nomads through the gardens, bumping surfaces, sipping sources as it dips and throws those undulating tremors of travelled-through wind. Its wing-beat pulses skip along, some hitting surface soon, bouncing along, others moving on steady wind until they die of seemingly natural causes, uninfluenced evaporation. These pulses form an ephemeral network with the bee, its legs, the wings, worked into oscillating webs that do it: cross-beyond-acoustic-pollination.

3. Infinitesimal progression-- the smallest wind-up mechanism on earth, sped up past possibility. Alteration so fast it becomes continuity-- only then does something respond to its call. The faintest curtain-- calling pitter-patter accompaniment of harmony almost a parody of past-the-point-of-noise. If automatic-rifle-triggered crickets got accompanied like this, well-- an entomology for a different time. The parody brings itself to its edge and past that, mimics grated wind-up action(in/com)possibility, singing I love you carried through a harsher wind and whispered into willows, plant-like palpitation of the heart a trunk, a drooping trunk of love-drunk weeping hair-lengths, put your hand in me feel the radicles of my infatuation-- not from trunk to roots but rather out through shiver-branches to weeping hair reconcilation, out through spores, through pollen, this love is a strange love my botanical amour.

Elizabeth Harnik (piano) and Ken Vandermark (reeds), Hideout, Chicago, 8/25/10

Dropping one by one, a field of flowers falls asleep. Each petaled member nods, moving from erect exhibition to steep drooping curve. Our botanical twilight: the lullaby a field sings to its flowers starts itself in small strokes, pinches-scatters nerves and hair. The bio-rhythm turns, though, to a sharpening of every line-- vibrations in the petal foldings, foldings-over, soft yet cruel. Put a rose to sleep with shrieking, lay a daisy down by stroking pistils sharp as nodding knives. Scatter ashes through them, blow gunpowder through their stems like fairy sleeping dust; they receive just enough shout-shrill of death to wake them, out of corporeal fear, by start of dawn.

Karl Paloucek (Piano, sewing machines, tinfoil, fan, electronic audio), Elastic, Chicago, 8/13/10

A telephone line lined with birds-- humming gristling rustling, the line swooped slightly down in the center: a libido. Flutter ruffled feathers as the wind adjusts its fingers-- him, the tension, hold my legs down or the birds will--one by one.

And they do, no matter what you use to bind me to the bed they orient, group-quiver, generating-recreating patterns then destroying them across the sky and houses, hold me down or I'll-- the dog barks, trees perk up, leaves slide along my line I tremble, too receptive this is classical orgasm in a trash can, beating fists against the old metal-betrothed lid-for-a-pillow, like I told you now no matter how you earnestly restrain me-- elevation, just the fact of flight has upside-downed my line, up-curved its swoop, tearing the lining of birds from the vintage skirting of desire, defying the gravity of gesture.

Vertonen (turntable, various audio), Elastic, Chicago, 8/13/10

If stone doves could speak-- gravel-beat rotation coos into the cupped of your hand as she rolls over in bed. The night-shakes at their sheet-tangled, most twisted; oscillation, tuned to sweating hordes of toads converging in the grass outside. Their sounds self-stone, self-grate, turn on the autoimmune audio, all that's left as film between your fingers. Screw your eyes, inward-oscillate your rough-way through the night; the world bleats beats, coos stucco drying, croaks the gravel-passing of each nanosecond. You are a cementing jack-in-the-box, we are the handle; excreting chunks of granite as the world turns (down), as it grinds (to the ground), like the ocean alarmed at a Gorgon's onset, yet refusing still to cease fully to wave. Incorporated, though, the water rock-weeps, rhythm transformed into self-ossification, a Gorgonite cosmology, served raw on a turn-table.

Nicole Bindler (movement and voice) and Michael Zerang (percussion and movement), Outer Space, Chicago, 8/8/09

The hoard

moves above her, swarming-- rhythmic. She moves, pointing through it, waving past it.

It moves, buzzing multiplicitous terror, alarming unity-- she pulls, pushing hole, resisting this force of the swarm. It insists, encircles, forms an insect-mirror for her; she moves past it, comes to haunt it with her soma.

She pushes it, angular, forward, forces fresh reciprocation, forming corporeal street signs that all come to meet it. She allows it to engulf her, insect-fan her into fevered slumber; drunken, she pushes walls aside-together, renders wings from nought but air, allows the swarm to form new wind-- wing at each heel, she breathes its rhythm, sings electric, pounds percussive pounds of flesh. Synchronic, pound for pulsion, she-it-they-her, he-we-him.

An ocean, wave by roiling wave she laps the final him of it, flesh-foam of movement, rubs us back to skin.