Sarah's Soundscripts

About this blog

2011-06-30T16:14:00.000-07:00

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

2011-06-30T13:21:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-30T19:30:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-30T19:16:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-16T15:52:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-16T15:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-09T14:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Asimina Chremos (movement and voice) and Carol Genetti (movement and voice), Outer Space, Chicago, 8/8/09

2009-08-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

Feel the weight of this intricate, furred machinery: cogs and coils, belts and whistles, grind together, tense-intensing. One metal part follows another, snapping, squeaking, hurting, heaving-- a machinic Nutcracker nightmare unfolds in sneaky pairs, only to ebb as self-lingering tone.

One by one, parts mean themselves off into singularities, moaning against context until muscles scream-- render themselves hoarse-- breaking into stubborn idiosyncrasy.

In rending itself from the machine, a part stretches, lengthens, vibrates over, grows alone-ly into pattern. You can feel it when your finger runs across it: subtle scary ribbing multiplies itself out as it feels, extends its pattern through reflexive contact.

Folding back along its form, unknowing stretch of a de-structured mouse machine, it grates along across, back down its ribbing as it feels, taking quiet creaky care as it back-folds, building nests of breath and hair into each strip of involuted corner. Nesting leads to breeding, tiny Nutcracker exchanges, quickened amorous pliés of infestation take it, waking, into life.

Jenny Gräf Sheppard, Osmosymbiotic Echo (sound installation), Florasonic series, Lincoln Park Conservatory, Chicago, 12/07/08

2008-12-07T15:38:00.000-08:00

Hum of substance; smell of earth. Entering through ears and nostrils, we are filter-filled with the terrifying beauty of persistence. An overlying softness of shrill, consistently haunting, nearly-pulsing. Our ears consume, cognize, adjust, are constituted in these acts of ingestive synthesis. Our nostrils breath an underlying roll of thick, the musty rich of life-giving, tragedy of organic breakdown. Depth and anticipation; death and nervous heaven-- we are filled and fraught between.

Bird-cries oscillate, twitter, tear at ethereality; the verdancy of ferns unfurls itself, unfurls again. Gutteral machines emerge, drown the cries, ruffle the leaves, and disappear again into-beyond the overlying hum, into-within the earth that insists, hungry, indifferent, insisting hunger in its very indifference.

Light fades to purple; shadows move-- enduring alteration, we return, return again to hum and earth, our ears and nostrils quivering for that which cannot but endure. Birds near or far, insect variation, the darkened shades and hidden details; holes of blackness even, where twilight obscures. We are filled with earth; our bodies humming earth, as violent violet tumbles slowly into green.

Dedicated in memory of Peter Ginsberg, 1982-2008

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

2008-09-14T14:49:00.000-07:00

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.

Magda Mayas, Michael Zerang, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Tony Buck and Jaimie Branch, Heaven Gallery, Chicago, 9/6/08

2008-09-14T11:04:00.001-07:00

Set #3

We are in a pipe, caught, feelers hitting the grime, the built-up walls of this cylindrical drop-space. Water streams from above, gets in our eyes, we blink and struggle, try to shake liquid from our insect eyelashes, from our segmented thought-crevices. We re-steady ourselves, steel ourselves for the next rain, our tiny foot-pads slipping on the newly moistened grime, underwater sounds echoing in drips and slides as the reverberation of our legs push sounds strugglingly through our body.

Starting with our antennae, we attempt to advance upward, toward the flash of sky above, despite the onslaught of sewage water, despite the narrowness of our confines, despite the wildcats that growl and hiss on the other side of the walls. Rising, extending bit by bit, we expand with the variability of the arcs our feelers can form. The need to sense -- the physical function of tasting space, feeling time-- requires our wire-thin, millipede-leg-like, guitar-string-like, human-hair-like extenders to: extend. We draw ourselves out, draw ourselves further, in order to experience experience-- in order to sense sense. We struggle against the vise of our consciousness in order to embody our surroundings.

Utilizing every insect muscle, strained past the point of reality, we cry; we listen to the falling pipe-water droplets echo as we cry; we cry so that grime-water will echo. Each droplet sounds until it hits our tiny body with a sensitive PANG-- each one sounds a second time as we shake it from ourselves, continuing its journey downward. The wildcats growl at us from just beyond these grimy walls, as we slowly scrape our way up the sides of the pipe. Menacing, taunting, they growl low and tumble, a rising chorus of annoyed adversariality, of denigration in the face of our attempt at ascension.

Less than an inch have we advanced toward the top of the enclosure. Foreign abstract water-bugs buzz in our exhausted ears as we swell our red insect cheeks, puff the breath required for movement, required even for maintaining this current position.

A moment of quiet as we relax our body, save for the legs: taught, holding us; we are a web of entemological perseverance; the wildcats have gone to the waterhole and cease, temporarily, to taunt us; we replace their antics, terrified, hopeful, with the internal shuddering of physical advancement, the unlikely expression of actual movement.

Haptic, Elastic Arts, Chicago, 8/22/08

2008-08-23T11:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-16T14:58:00.000-07:00

"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.

Eric Leonardson (springboard) and Eric Glick Rieman (prepared Rhoded piano), AV Aerie, Chicago, 8/15/08

2008-08-16T08:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Eric Leonardson (springboard) and Carol Genetti (voice), Elastic Arts, Chicago, 8/11/08

2008-08-12T09:32:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-12T09:13:00.001-07:00

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.

Katt Hernandez (violin), Studio 34, Philadelphia, 6/28/08

2008-07-12T15:27:00.000-07:00

A sewing machine appears, simultaneously gliding and puncturing a vast landscape of hills and variable slopes. The machine glides across our surface, a silent surface. The surface presents itself as stoic, as the machine's needle crosses, recrosses its own paths, tracing punctured paths, freehand lines, butterfly trails of consistently and silently hammered hole-patterns. Gradually the surface's stoic front wears down. As it grates and wavers, it forces high-pitched tones, beginning to betray, through gradual sound, its own pain.

Katt Hernandez (violin) and Liza Clark (dance), Nexus, Philadelphia, 5/28/08

2008-05-31T08:56:00.000-07:00

An airplane takes off, sampled/resampled each time his closet door opens. Tiny pins, millions of them, vibrating in an eternal flush of wing, acoustic repetition electric sensation, the catharsis of take-off rendered, packaged only in the sense that the scraped bare antelope in you ricochets with a scraped thump off walls, rather than plummeting into a velvet long(est) vacuum. The skin of our sound is peeled in melancholy layers, raw panic contained within melancholy the way our sampled flight is contained within these four walls.

We begin to gain control, learn sustainment within panicked containment, sustenance within sound skin scraped bare. We learn to deliver our pain, moderate our thirst, filter our panic through electric hair-raised spoonfuls of human meat, of dulled-grief repeat collision, of melancholy series of deflected trajectory.

Dave Smolen (electronics), The Rotunda, Philadelphia, 5/14/08

2008-05-31T08:52:00.000-07:00

Stuttered series of stabbed entries, or at least violent indentations-- digital blood vessels broken in big dots on taut, skin-like, tent-like surfaces, surfaces dipped and pulled like Lyotard's extended human expanse, draped over violent rhythm. So many points of contact/entry that the surface gets refreshes, re-constituted in ripples of violence as wave texture. Entry that is sometimes just a stab, sometimes a movement that opens out, sustains, layering patches of different levels, forming provisional new surfaces. New levels extend simultaneously above and below our point of multiplication, sound extension as a perpetuating, self-making prosthesis series.

Lionshead (Julius Masri (drums), Ben Remsen (guitar)), The Rotunda, Philadelphia, 5/14/08

2008-05-31T08:47:00.000-07:00

Drums like thunder in timed waves that crest backwards. Guitar like snails and crickets in long uneven grass, montaged in matching crests. Backwards filmic in the south of France. Thunder following the direction of little girls skipping through the grass, but thick due to the wind changing direction and contradicting itself.