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.