Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello + objects), Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago, 9/12/08

Can a swelling be beautiful? No metaphoric flesh-blossom here: our skin swells up and out, a continuum of mottled purple; out and out, a body rising uncomfortably thickened.

The swelling becomes breath: in out in out, undulations of variably filled flesh. The controlled breath-swell becomes frantic, multiplied, desperate, direction-full: it goes it goes it goes-- multiplicitous, anxiety of exhalation, we can barely breathe through what we (must) communicate.

Can an infection be beautiful? The purplish flesh, the skin filling with inflammatory matter; now emptying of inflammatory matter, pulled and pricked, rubbed and wronged now by anxious, clamoring bees. They crawl with itchy foot-pads, dragging their languorous bodies along the variable hills, sloped valleys filling with their pollen. These fluffy snowdrifts settle into the opposite of swelling, unevenly, as the bees descend and drag their bulky, waxy bodies across our flesh. Their itchy, sharp legs and feet wear tiny pinpricks in our infected flesh as they traverse terrain. Their needles transgress the space of our undulating breath-swell.

Crossing / recrossing their own paths, the bees begin to frustrate and confuse as they fall / fall again into their own foot-holes. Slow pus is pushed out from the increasingly worn pinpricks, coaxed by the weight of their insect bodies and the meddling of their sharp, scratchy legs.

Slowly, they begin to get stuck in their own pollen as the thick wet pus mixes with the yellow drifts which decorate the valleys of our infected flesh. The bees' flurried movements, at first an expression of carefree, mindless exploration, turn now to slow, desperate burrowing, ironically embodying a frantic, trapped freneticism of spirit.

Their burrowing, in turn, resolves itself into a quiet, gentle drowning, their bulky, pointy-tailed bodies sinking into the concavities filled by their pollen, fully thickened now by the pus of our corporeal landscape.

Their death-cries sound like slow elastic band-aid marathons, like muffled, candied fire alarms, like throaty swan-songs erupting into snow.