Pentimento

The blast furnace dreams, warm and obliterate. Their fiery peals shooking deep. Memory feigns, a  the product of texture and decay.  A simple movement sequence folding back over itself endlessly as wings or hearts do. Each iteration tracing each before, their miniature deviations are the noise of the new.

untremble

Tracing the sunshine, broken sightlines. The city petrifies. From a window of the chelsea hotel looking down over the unsilent glows over midtown, looking down through the embers of a thousand days and a thousand nights. The rooms creak with the smolder of the gone before, the rooms creak with a sympathetic resonance tied up in the sun’s pleading and the sun’s reprimand. All the dull beiges and the lustred spires, all of them untrembling in the face of demise. All filtered through the perfect folded kaleidoscope of memory, delicate, strange and still.

Frays

 

The hardness limbs of distance, gold light and fissures. The space of the enclosure, the space of the opening. The way these things live out abandon, the way they trace the lines of age in sweeping details, in peelings, in the merciless gesturings of gravity and heat. Our sense of decay informing our sense of growth, ongoing.

Contour

The city speaks volumes. Smokestacks and insulation, sharp brown on dull grey. The contours trained to our eyes, and our eyes linger, over that bridge, through fencemesh and cracked panes, the silt of riverbank sidewalks, silt churned by the soles of a hundred thousand boot bottoms, our knees and ankles turning clouds.

curtain

A friend from greece complains about the curtains in this city, their brash transparency, the light broaching them at will. Gauze relief, tasseled and porous, shimmering the outside.

Inertia Distort

The break of the light through cold mornings, cut to soft mingled shards of violet and grey. The air gets stiller, the sound of it both muted and sharp. The compression of snowbanks and black ice. Short days, taut like interrogation, familiar and removed.

between again

aggregate. time passing ever less slowly, making rounds of these inertias, making rounds.

helic

Devotions; to the new swathes of silver noise blaring sublte through the back windows, to the flux of Clark street syphoning the Metropolitain Expressway down through little Italy, to the new musical tastes of new neighbours, to the plumbing and its idiosyncratic rhythms. Most, though, to the new sounds emergent from a new space. As before.

SOUNDINGS: Washes

rest

The waterfall’s hushes, light aircraft droning, cicada billows. The chorus of them rising and falling like only the wind can, or heat. A chorus singing the tangible waves of sun’s expansion into the substance folds, enveloping. Later, there was a disco song coming over the outdoor loudspeakers, and endless bassline holepunched with cowbell rings and kick drums and over its uniform tapestry one of the summer birds was singing its song in key, perfectly in key, and their taut synchopation, their fluid evolvement was magic for a moment. This trusting collusion of soundspace, subtle reminder that each voice places itself, willing or not, in the shared aria.

vexations II

have been making some money sanding the varnish off the pineboard exterior of a house near St. Sauveur. Usually three of us to a wall, with some combination of handheld Dremel sanders. The harmonics get stunning, after about an hour in the insulatory space of dust mask and goggles and earplugs with the constant frictive propulsion running up through the shoulders the headspace opens again, lets the beauty back. The first day that we worked, the overlaps and the glissandos were conjuring Badalamenti’s suspense theme from Twin Peaks, the chord progression that Moby sampled to build ‘Go’. And it made me wonder whether that sort of frictive movement inspired the soundtrack, whether there was a deep evocation there of sawmills and white pine being stripped and planked.

Vexations

On Tuesday I sat through a concert that Phil Niblock gave at the Sala Rosa. The experience was traumatic – if we understand trauma to be a distruption, a jarring unsettling invasion that leaves its markings, that changes the infrastructure of the body. In the insistence of the drones and their sheer density there is an impulsion toward transcendence, a primal activation of flight and fury. To sit with open ears through the vexations of Niblock’s feedback waves requires the suspension of diversion. Asks that we go beyond the mind’s incessant longing for pleasantry and engage the physicality of immanence. Ans as the drones subside, the ears emerge, new shoots after the rainstorm. For as long as the body holds the memory, the sound textures around us are enlivened wiith the beauty and menace of still standing time. We sat in the kitchen drinking sake and listening to the overtones of the old refrigerator, every now and then one of us would shake our heads quietly.

SOUNDINGS: hovers

silo

The massive contours impress the eyes but also the ears, the sound image made in silence, the unconcious acoustic calculation of these resonating pipes. Three winters ago I braved the freeze and made recordings in an abandoned silo down by the port, the same row of towers where the silophone is installed. Climbed through the rusting belly of it banging and scraping – sounding the hull of this derilect vessel. The sound below is something else entirely, but steeped somehow in the feel of its emptiness and echoes.

SOUNDINGS: Silo Rings

The finnish wears. Fissures make a map, cut soft continents from the underside, islands in the eddies of blue. all maps are maps of time. We defer to the lines as bearers of place and forget easily that cartography is timestamp above all. Eno’s original Ambient series all wore maps on their sleeves, placeless maps that speak of ambiguous space, but equally of ambiguous time – of time being charted without a scale. The music suspends context, as a map that reveals only itself in its lines.

outcrop

The way things grow. The way things age, pass through the consecutions of time, and in each set moment give of themselves to the place they inhabit. We behold. Spring snow and dithered rebar, placid ice and unclean shadows, the little reeds of another season.

Sounding: THE RAIN ELECTRIC

screens

The white open of the window. white open in the rose coloured room. To record is to extract, to refine. To make duration endure. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of movie theaters tell this. The luminous altar at front of the room, full with light past. Opaque and transcendent. In that swelling is the implicit promise of beyond, of the fulcrum hinging before and toward.

suture

John Berger wrote of Francis Bacon that what was acheived in the best of his paintings was a kind of distillation – time evaporating under the slow heat of pain. Pain being that which marks, that which leaves us traced and scarred and unable to shake the immanence. The movements of time wrought in the physical world are just this careful scar tissue. The beauty sides with the pain. Like Ingrid Calame’s stains transcribed from the sidewalks of ubiquity, or Burtinsky’s spectral ore spilling vivid damage on brittle skin.

Sounding . . . RELEASES

illumina

light tunnels. yellowbled distortion. heat claws. illuminated beyond recognition. in constraint the volume held spills in on itself as the organ tones in the belly of a cathedral breathing and folding, making tremolo morass of the open air. the ends of harmony. and god, they say, is in the saturation.

silscape

The archaic violence of the silhouette old as light and shadow are. The haze of distance just unseen, the far bank, the trees. The fragile angularities of antenna stands and chimneys. The field of vision again. The wide way that the eye sweeps the city and the river and the forest beyond.

triptych

Over the ruins. Through the obscure lense of sediment, the distortion of time’s accumulation. The way that castles become sand, the way the eyes wither slowly and light swells new obscurity. In the dark room watching the stillness, there listening to the darkness, sealed in the anechoic distance that the windows impose. In the silence creeps the unheard, the vast and the slow, the crumble and the rot. All of history is distilled static.

ingrate

prints on prints on grates above the unders of the city caught crystaline in mid winter. subtle reminders. cartires and sewer grates and the rumble of the city’s machinery, the deep intestinal burl of liquid spending, of pistons flailing. of the piecemeal process that leaves only these passing fossils, here and gone.