As though lying on our backs, we submit to an urge to turn over. The journey to the halfway point: groggy fluttering. Gritted teeth. Mounting tension. Our muscles sing; they sing on a throbbing platform of motor attempts.
Success: balancing now, we hold ourselves on our side, every inch and angle burning, cerebral cortex straining, holding the body's variable x note.
We death-flirt at the threshold past which gravity would embrace our burning noise. Hips to the floor, side-leg smashed flat, we turn our eyes toward this imminent descent. Yet suddenly our desire to flip/to fall is overcome by a terror of propulsion-rushing change. Our ears fill with saw blades, our nostrils with phosphorus. Our tongue swells, we are astronauts flabbergasted by self-induced, unruly fate-- too late, we pray-fall into the deadly cradle of rollercoaster departure, singed hair flies away as we involuntarily embark. Falling into the noise our pancake body is scheduled to produce on impact, we drop toward the ground and
sliver, mid-air, into pieces, small bits of our matter following the example of those fleeing-fried follicles. Pieces grate off our being, we are a solid metal train slowly elapsing, our anticipated fate of slam-dunk, hard-screech impact noise is displaced by a rain of incensed slow-motion hardware sparks, shimmering into no-way danger zones, testing the limits of temporality as they crescendo into stuttered transcendence-in-becoming.
A brake gets pulled, strained, not enough to stop us but only to squeal sustained shattering, a process of fragmentation that moves simultaneously with the pieced-off, fly-away, singed-hair-following substance of our metal flesh, and against it, both enabling our flight-descent and refuting it. Wavy, transformative path, we regenerate our shattered motor-innards like a lizard grows a second tail, fucking over space and time, making violent waves in these pools of ether, shifting machinic organs to withstand gravity's night-shivered, corset-gloved touch.
Holes gape open now within us, outside airplane noise penetrating our 90-proof walls. We yawn, hard air consuming our screams, night-violence-spotted creature that we've become, we begin to merge with the air that drown-surrounds us. The atmosphere spots us; we spot back; diving abyssal interpolation of creative pain.
Our sound-flame drowned by air-like bass, we cut our own liquor, diet our figure, flood our own flow with atmosphere. We dilate our pupils, stretch past our nylons, flicker our light source: dialectic self-interference patterns render us violent-violated-ephemeral.
One last clutch of self claws through us, echoing out and down as we become atmosphere. We "arrive," to find that we now reside only in this empty force of air as it kisses the anticipated impact-surface, restlessly searching our matter for bodies to crash, finding only a certain melancholic solace in the evocation that absence performs.
The Young Equestrians, AV Aerie, Chicago, 8/15/08
"Harmonica Song"
An endless spine, lubricated to facilitate loose-tongued, southwestern stagger. Ambling up and down along the slightly bumpy path of beer-drugged, one-street-towned dinosaur vertebra, we drag our lips and tongues behind us as we grope, groggy, along these bones. Putting our breath before our bodies, we cloud and hug the sideways, smoothed-out bumps of a spine that fails to stop.
Spine reaches out before our half-hungry eyes. We push our breath, now, along its path. After our breath clouds around the newest few humps but before our dragging tongues catch up, half-divine sun-moisture-nourishment coaxes a bloom from this old, bone-dry bone: sparkling, anticipatory-cathartic, bits and pieces of a playground begin to rise like fast-forwarded flowers across the narrow spine-expanse in front of us. The top bar of a swing set, then the vertical chains, then the swing seats, the magnificent set now trembles before us as we gather up our lagging tongues and lips. Looking on, our hearts pang, our eyes water fruitfully. Now the top handles of a slide appear, the mere suggestion of a slide form lubricating our tired hearts and eyes. Curve-slip-down-around-and-out, here too now stands the entire slide. Finally, as dust kicks up to form a gently cyclonic cloud of shimmering particles, we know already what comes to rise-- oh dear lord we mutter-- ohh-- a merry-go-round glides into existence, whipping our hair back as it swings into sweet focus.
We look back at all the miles we've traveled, lifetimes of humping chair-backed links. We look back and think how hard it's been, simply to drag sensation into being, into the bone-dry, dead-static desert of someone's present.
We look forward, imagining what it will be now to drag that dry present into motion; into action; into play.
An endless spine, lubricated to facilitate loose-tongued, southwestern stagger. Ambling up and down along the slightly bumpy path of beer-drugged, one-street-towned dinosaur vertebra, we drag our lips and tongues behind us as we grope, groggy, along these bones. Putting our breath before our bodies, we cloud and hug the sideways, smoothed-out bumps of a spine that fails to stop.
Spine reaches out before our half-hungry eyes. We push our breath, now, along its path. After our breath clouds around the newest few humps but before our dragging tongues catch up, half-divine sun-moisture-nourishment coaxes a bloom from this old, bone-dry bone: sparkling, anticipatory-cathartic, bits and pieces of a playground begin to rise like fast-forwarded flowers across the narrow spine-expanse in front of us. The top bar of a swing set, then the vertical chains, then the swing seats, the magnificent set now trembles before us as we gather up our lagging tongues and lips. Looking on, our hearts pang, our eyes water fruitfully. Now the top handles of a slide appear, the mere suggestion of a slide form lubricating our tired hearts and eyes. Curve-slip-down-around-and-out, here too now stands the entire slide. Finally, as dust kicks up to form a gently cyclonic cloud of shimmering particles, we know already what comes to rise-- oh dear lord we mutter-- ohh-- a merry-go-round glides into existence, whipping our hair back as it swings into sweet focus.
We look back at all the miles we've traveled, lifetimes of humping chair-backed links. We look back and think how hard it's been, simply to drag sensation into being, into the bone-dry, dead-static desert of someone's present.
We look forward, imagining what it will be now to drag that dry present into motion; into action; into play.
Eric Leonardson (springboard) and Eric Glick Rieman (prepared Rhoded piano), AV Aerie, Chicago, 8/15/08
Glass curves. Thick, dense, semi-opaque, they yawn, slowly overlapping in our vision as we crawl tentatively through the offered opening. The smooth, cool rim of the portal opens out onto a similar surface. The floor blends, curved, into walls that rise and slowly fold to form a variably sloped ceiling. All inside now, we stand in awe, in silence, in stillness, just past the entrance. Unbelievably, we find that while our bodies stand still, our thoughts begin to crawl along these glass surfaces, inching themselves along the floor at first, creating the most extraordinary auditory vibrations as they advance. These vibrations, we realize, subtly begin to oscillate our bodies as we stand.
Realizing that our inner thoughts play now for everyone to hear, we instinctively try to stop their production. This stress and tension only amplifies the thought-sounds, as they skip and stutter wildly across floor, walls and ceiling. Frantic to contain our innards, we mentally chase after each idea, each fragment, only to create an echo effect, a trace of vibration that trails behind each targeted one.
Like the thick glass roaring of lions, our intensified thoughts now reverberate across, around and through the enclosure. Sonic safari: we are confronted by our yawning, toothful thoughts, staring "into" our own terrifying mouths even as they skip and glide beyond static form.
Like snakes now, sliding across the rising side surfaces of our enclosure, a slow squiggling produces surprised, slight groaning: like plastic rubbing on plastic, our thoughts groan in spite of themselves as they involuntarily spread into wider, surface-covering snakes, like strips of thick, dreadfully exposed-erotic clay being gradually pounded against the walls.
Our amplified attempts to stop our own thoughts begin now to smooth out as we force relaxation, as we begin to move with, not against, our consciousness. Once relaxed and malleable, our meditation turns slowly to play, exploring the jungle of vibration that constitutes our collective cognitive existence, that vibratory viscerality in turn shifting our listening organs, muffling our hair, kissing and scratching our skin as we withstand its advances.
Our dusting of skin-hair raises and waves now, slightly, in tune to cognition reflected-echoed, our epidermis shifting in response to thoughts rendered vibratory. A kind of transcendent equilibrium results, with the occasional rogue idea dashing madly across a curve, creating stuttered, plastic sensations that tickle our otherwise focused thought.
As we slip-stand together, staggering with the drunk pleasure of transcendence, violent sounds appear slowly in the distance, sounds that could not possibly be caused by our own amplified minds. Looking around, our mouths drop as one by one, the massive glass walls, seemingly forming a full enclosure, begin to straighten. Like a giant focused flower opening, each wall erects itself loudly to reveal, crack by crack, a view of sky. We are overcome now by the violence of seismic sounds and come to the edge of tolerance, on the brink of breaking-- when all sounds suddenly cease. We stare, ungodly, upward, in a turned-sound-proof chamber of glass, violated now only by this floating piece of heavenly externality which gazes down on us.
Involuntarily speechless, now thoughtless, we watch what enters slowly through this revealed hole, but cannot reflect on what comes to pass, nor can we articulate it. Soundless ourselves, we stand dumb, in dread, in recordless witness.
Realizing that our inner thoughts play now for everyone to hear, we instinctively try to stop their production. This stress and tension only amplifies the thought-sounds, as they skip and stutter wildly across floor, walls and ceiling. Frantic to contain our innards, we mentally chase after each idea, each fragment, only to create an echo effect, a trace of vibration that trails behind each targeted one.
Like the thick glass roaring of lions, our intensified thoughts now reverberate across, around and through the enclosure. Sonic safari: we are confronted by our yawning, toothful thoughts, staring "into" our own terrifying mouths even as they skip and glide beyond static form.
Like snakes now, sliding across the rising side surfaces of our enclosure, a slow squiggling produces surprised, slight groaning: like plastic rubbing on plastic, our thoughts groan in spite of themselves as they involuntarily spread into wider, surface-covering snakes, like strips of thick, dreadfully exposed-erotic clay being gradually pounded against the walls.
Our amplified attempts to stop our own thoughts begin now to smooth out as we force relaxation, as we begin to move with, not against, our consciousness. Once relaxed and malleable, our meditation turns slowly to play, exploring the jungle of vibration that constitutes our collective cognitive existence, that vibratory viscerality in turn shifting our listening organs, muffling our hair, kissing and scratching our skin as we withstand its advances.
Our dusting of skin-hair raises and waves now, slightly, in tune to cognition reflected-echoed, our epidermis shifting in response to thoughts rendered vibratory. A kind of transcendent equilibrium results, with the occasional rogue idea dashing madly across a curve, creating stuttered, plastic sensations that tickle our otherwise focused thought.
As we slip-stand together, staggering with the drunk pleasure of transcendence, violent sounds appear slowly in the distance, sounds that could not possibly be caused by our own amplified minds. Looking around, our mouths drop as one by one, the massive glass walls, seemingly forming a full enclosure, begin to straighten. Like a giant focused flower opening, each wall erects itself loudly to reveal, crack by crack, a view of sky. We are overcome now by the violence of seismic sounds and come to the edge of tolerance, on the brink of breaking-- when all sounds suddenly cease. We stare, ungodly, upward, in a turned-sound-proof chamber of glass, violated now only by this floating piece of heavenly externality which gazes down on us.
Involuntarily speechless, now thoughtless, we watch what enters slowly through this revealed hole, but cannot reflect on what comes to pass, nor can we articulate it. Soundless ourselves, we stand dumb, in dread, in recordless witness.
Eric Leonardson (springboard) and Carol Genetti (voice), Elastic Arts, Chicago, 8/11/08
Improv #1
Exit-ing. We start as steam but quickly lose parts of ourselves to rubble-- bits of stone and gravel rumble 'round our valve, as steam-- moistureless steam-- escapes us. We stream it. We struggle with the tiny opening-- how much transmogrification must we endure to pass from one space, from one moment, to another?
As we condense into more graspable form, we march-skip-stumble through a padded echo. Murmuring moaning like mimetic mice, we crawl and grope toward an obscured sun.
Improv #4
Hound. A hell-hound, distorted jaw, glaring cross-eyed at the moon. Hissing, howling, hounding toward the sky, our luminous ball of light strikes back: hound-moon discourse sounds like waves of static undermining an articulation of horror. Yet once they open up this channel of communication, unforeseen moments of serenity, of ecstasy, reveal themselves. Chipmunks chew through the telegraph cords, nesting, making evil love among the fraying strands of wire; yet their vile chattering and hissing are punctuated by patches of prayer-like swoon, their stretches of cacaphonic infestation bridged by meditative vibratto, all elapsing in lengthening periods on a bed of softly coiling noise.
Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello and various), Improv #1, Elastic Arts, Chicago, 8/11/08
Skin, draped and looping. Long, thin-thick stretches of it, extending and contracting its own strip-expanses, like an octopus with both arm-ends attached: derma- elastic teacup multiplied, draped arms radiating outward from an undefined center.
Falling now, a gravity-variable journey "downward": we drop down in space a few inches only to "scratch" ourselves backwards, like a vertically manipulated disc in time/space: d o w n - w - n - w - n - w - n. Gravity tightens its sound control: knobs tuned so finely that we are virtually suspended in Butoh-like, verging-on-absurd, verging-on-obscene tension vibration.
The tension slackens. We expand our corporeal existence-- rubbing sensually-obscenely against the walls of the tubular, shoot-like container that shapes us subtly while containing us oppressively. Inside this manhole that undulates more or less, we rub our undulating skin-fat against these walls, creating sounds of gross pleasure-- private, almost pornographic, repetitive rub-downs. Friction against our own walls-- we trap ourselves in this topography of contact.
When we come, it draws out, a sharp, piercing trajectory that outlives our expectations for sustained erotic noise. Lulled into this extension cradle of lengthening frequency, we inhabit a single pierced hole in our collective flesh, drilling our way to the (other) side of orgasm, to the far shore of self-gratification, pushing ourselves so far past the coming that we begin to break down, blips in our self-transmission, losing ourselves in the pieces of nothing, the pieces skipped over, the gaps in our flight.
Our oscillation between something and nothing distills us, finally, into a brute-beautiful motor: we are simple: humming: function: pure.
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