“Other times I feel like art is a nervous tic. Like someone left a window open in me, and a demon comes through the window sometimes and sits on the back of my neck and tells me that I need to be doing something that I’m not doing, gives me ideas for what I should do next, and makes me stressed about the resources and time it will take for me to complete this task, not to mention what I will do with it after, or who, if anyone, the demon wants me to try to impress. Poetry is almost never a friendly demon, meaning it never wants to just invite me over to eat fruit in its yard. It wants me to do something, or I want it to do something. We are not simply chilling together, letting each other exist, despite what the old books would have me believe.”
Category Archives: theory
“Martyna Basta’s music is like time encapsulated as sound. The title of her last album evokes the idea of a semi-memory, one where it’s unclear whether it really happened or if it’s something we created. “For me, these reflections, these pranks of memory, found their place somewhere in my process, which involved rummaging through archives but also adding something from the present, going back to libraries and digging up things I didn’t remember ever creating,” Basta says. She creates something from the reality that is here and now; the sounds are natural, they are actual, they had their place and their time that she was there to experience. She translates that into music, giving them a fundamental meaning.”
Kite: Listening is not a practice, but the practice of the unattainable. In that possibility of making anything—like new knowledge, where the act of listening becomes endless—you can only hope to hear something during each repetition of whatever it is you’re listening to. You only find the repetition through prolonged listening—it’s like having an extended ear and waiting for the pattern to show itself. Learning something new, listening to Elders, experiencing horrible things and experiencing really good things are some examples.
All I can hope is that each time the repetitions happen, I’m able to listen and catch something important. It’s always good to have a community that reminds me to remember. We constantly go back to the source material, back to the people—you always have to go back and consult. That’s a cyclical thing, to be more than metaphorical, but maybe less than totally tangible. That’s what frequencies do: each sound oscillation is just a cyclical wave that comes and goes infinitely. Technically, if a sound goes out into the universe, it has the potential to go on forever. A light wave is the light cone.
https://canadianart.ca/interviews/practising-the-unattainable-bellow-kite/
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/everything-i-say-is-true-poetic-bibliography/
https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/lewis-arista-pechawis-kite/release/1
Liars
A widespread, secret religion, whose followers believe that there is no God, no afterlife and no inherent meaning to existence. However, they also believe that life should be treasured and happiness is a good that should be pursued. Because the depressing truth of existence is counterproductive to achieving this goal, Liars endeavor to cultivate beautiful fabrications instead; among these fabrications are faiths, political movements, and high ideals, which are designed to improve upon history and mythology in order to increase the beauty of the world.
– from George R.R. Martin’s Thousand Worlds
…this chaos is generated out of a certain water that is not common, not out of Dew, nor Ayre condensed in the caverns of the Earth, or artificially in the Receiver; not out of water drawn out of the Sea, Fountains, Pitts, or Rivers, but out of a certain tortured water, that hath suffered some alteration, obvious it is to All, but known to very few. This water hath all in it that is necessarie to the perfection of the work, without any Extrinsecall Addition.
-Thomas Vaughan, Magica Adamica
When I say “I,” does it
include things around it?
When I say “I,” doesn’t it
include unknown mountains and rivers?
– Lee Ufan
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: Sometimes I think of the world as this network of relationships between humans and plants and animals and the natural world, spanning across time and space, and I think of my body as a hub in that algorithm, and that I’m made up of relationships, and I’m made up of communication and sometimes that’s physical and sometimes that’s spiritual, and sound is part of that.
And so sometimes I think songs are stories, sometimes they’re prayers, sometimes they’re ethics, sometimes they’re connectors, sometimes they’re healers, they have a power and it comes from a place that I don’t think that I can fully understand or articulate.
https://earwaveevent.org/article/discussion-with-leanne-simpson/
https://earwaveevent.org/article/discussion-with-raven-chacon/
whole magazine is really nice !!
“Latin America in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s underwent a profound and often violent process of social change. From the Cuban Revolution to the massive guerrilla movements in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, and most of Central America, to the democratic socialist experiment of Salvador Allende in Chile, to the increased popularity of socialist oriented parties in Uruguay, or “socialist-leaning” movements, such as the Juventud Peronista in Argentina, the idea of a really possible social change was in the air.
Although this topic has been explored from a political and social point of view, there is an aspect that has remained fairly unexplored. The cultural, and especially musical dimension of this movement, so vital in order to comprehend the extent of its emotional appeal, has not been fully documented. Literally, people put constantly their lives at risk opposing authoritarian regimes and participating in rallies to support their political parties, all the while singing militant songs that gave them the courage to do so. “There is no revolution without songs” proclaimed the huge banner installed behind the stage where newly elected President Salvador Allende (surrounded by the most important members of “Nueva Canción Chilena”—Chilean New Song) first celebrated his electoral victory in 1970.”
from https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Militant_Song_Movement_in_Latin_Amer/kAaLAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
They party alone with the digital DJ. They lounge alone with the digital DJ. They mourn lost connections alone with the digital DJ. They console themselves about being alone, alone with the digital DJ.
– Damon Krukowski