from https://www.objectsandsounds.com/sonic-confessions-with-martyna-basta/:
“When I make music, I feel like I’m writing a letter and my message is just expressed in tones instead of words. The fragments of my thoughts are scattered in pieces, so perhaps my message is never clear but rather just full of questions.
Most of the time I also feel like the pieces I make are just kind of coming my way and taking shape naturally. Almost as if it’s happening without my control, even though I’m the creator. I am also an observer at the same time, so the outcome is always a surprise.
…
My process is spontaneous and chaotic. I feel very strongly driven by intuition and impulsivity. I can create a piece in a very short period, but I find that it’s important for my practice to leave it for a while, so I can come back to it and hear it differently or have other ideas that can contribute to it. Giving space to my music is just as important to me as making music.”
…
from https://shapeplatform.eu/2023/mistakes-became-a-source-of-inspiration-an-interview-with-martyna-basta/:
“From what I’ve observed – because I believe that being driven by intuition means that you also learn about your practice on the way – my albums evolve as a culmination of emotions, sentiments, or images experienced during a particular period. I never start a record with a blank page, but rather collect some sketches for a while, see what they’re about, and only from there I start to weave everything together, adding some new little narratives here and there. It’s very interesting to me because it shifts your position from being a maker, a musician, to being an observer. I like to think of music not just as a product of my making, but as something mysteriously materialising before me, originating from some magical realm.
…
I don’t think I’ve ever sonified a specific memory – it evokes the action, but it’s more a feeling that leaves a trace in the music. When I revisit my past compositions, it’s like flipping through old photographs, revealing fleeting glimpses of emotions. This is the essence of how my compositions unfold – I often blend field recordings from different times and places into a cohesive whole.”
Feeding the Worms
by Danusha Laméris
Ever since I found out that earthworms have taste buds all over
the delicate pink strings of their bodies, I pause dropping apple
peels into the compost bin, imagine the dark, writhing ecstasy,
the sweetness of apples permeating their pores. I offer beets and
parsley, avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.
I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden,
almost vulgar-though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure so
sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can,
forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.
Excerpts from https://publications.iai.spk-berlin.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/Document_derivate_00002030/BIA_055_067_081.pdf (this does include briefly the negative associations between q’iwa, homosexuality, and unproductivity that Elly mentions in the other thing I will link below, but think it is worth reading first if you are not familiar with the language/vocabulary for context before diving deeper):
Ethnomusicological studies in other parts of the world have noted correspondences between sound structure in music and social structure (e.g. Feld 1984). Similarly, I shall suggest that specific sounds used in musical performance, by certain peasant farmers in highland Bolivia, both appear to reflect and are perceived to manipulate social and cosmological structures. (note: see Noise by Jacques Attali for more on how musical relationships can affect new relationships in this world and beyond)
…
Whilst in the towns q’iwa is commonly translated as maricón or homosexual, in the countryside it is used in a less specific way to refer to a variety of aspects of gender mediation. A man with a high-pitched voice is q’iwa as is a woman who speaks in a low-pitched voice or acts like a man. Similarly the term is used to refer to men when they dress up in women’s clothes for certain rituals. But more specifically, on several occasions I have been told that q’iwa is khuskan qhari, khuskan warmi or “half-man, half-woman”. As such, q’iwa represents the conjunction of male and female, where the opposing sexes mix together equally.
…
Excerpts from https://www.momaps1.org/post/228-transcriptions-of-the-indigenous-and-migrant-justice-symposium:
Elly Crampton Chuquimia Quiñones-Tancara: In the 5th edition modern Aymara-Castellano dictionary, q’iwa & q’iwsa are treated as synonyms for queer people. Strategically, the new entries omit the anti-queer or bad character traits that have come to be associated with the terms (thank you Dr. Pairumani). We recall the musical or medicinal roles of these terms, which shows their unique medicinal or practical functions— for instance, the q’iwsa siku and q’iwa pinkillu. Q’iwsa also relates to the anti-spiral, unscrewing, twisting or luxation/dislocation, and q’iwa— the tears of our ancestors as qillqa, as writing, as language, joyful sadness. It is this medicine that also directs our roles as queer (q’iwa/q’iwsa) people for our communities, our relations, which is our ayni to the pachanaka, reciprocity to our people. The refusal of this medicine, brought by Christian doctrine, state law, and so forth, has caused a break in ayni that has yet to be paid back, or made just. In our commitment to our relations and the wak’as, our ancestors, we as queer people continue to give back what we owe, even when our medicine is so often mistaken for poison. We have a saying in our language, which is said many ways, but that I learned this way: qhipnayr uñtasisawa sarnaqaña. This is translated as: hay que mirar el pasado y el futuro para proyectarse en el presente—we must look at past and future in order to project ourselves in the present. Google translates it as: walking around looking backwards. Recalling the verb q’iwsuña, in the context of this phrase, we’re reminded that living in so-called reverse is also a perspective of balance. When it’s winter in our territories, it’s summer over here—to be in good relation with these lands I must live in reverse.
The phrase qhipnayara uñtasisawa sarnaqaña also implies we live with the ancestors in permanent encounter. The ancestors in our misperceived individuation, the elders of our elders, what physicists call the void, vacuum, the powerful small, where spacetime undoes—they say—somewhere around 10 minus 33 cm (a physicist told me that once). Can we understand that permanent encounter means we can give up the story of loss and recovery and remember what we already know, what cognitive neuroscience calls implicit or non-declarative memory, immemorable memory, which, as such, cannot be forgotten.
…
Ch’ixi indicates grayishness. Specifically, tiny spots, in contrast to the word allqa, which refers to big spots. This is important because allqa is associated with the contrasting colors that are seen as paired, and sometimes differentiated from q’iwa or queer medicine, which is frequently called lonely or single, separated from pairing (while q’iwsa also means “to remove something from its place,” we should be careful using q’iwa and q’iwsa as synonyms).
Through ch’ixi, what appears as a solid color, gray, is in fact made up of various spots. What is sometimes missed in the translation of the word ch’ixi, is that it also means a pile of small rocks, additionally, referring to the Pleiades constellation. Ch’ixi is also accumulated scree or the rocky debris that forms below mountains. Perhaps this recalls the image of our chullpas, the stone mounds that hold our eldest elders, in Paqajes. The spots & grayness of ch’ixi describe the titi felid or Andean cat, which the great Aymara scholar Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua drew as chuqui chinchay or qowa, writing this quote “very speckled animal” was “guardian of hermaphrodites, Indians of two natures.” Pachacuti also illustrates the relation, between the Pleiades, Venus, and chuqui chinchay or qowa the cat—our elders still speak these connections, as do confesionarios from the early colonial period.
…
It is in this context that Dr. Cusicanqui works our ancient queer medicines. Elaborating on that, we look at the suffix -naka, which is often referred to as a pluralizing suffix. Our elders tell us this suffix does not just indicate pluralization however, but variety, more precisely. So, when we say q’iwanaka and q’iwsanaka, we are referring to the manifold variations of so-called queer medicine. Re-sounding and practicing q’iwa and q’iwsa medicine is part of our ayni, our obligation of reciprocity as queer people. We say this in order to address the misunderstanding, of q’iwa, as unproductive, which comes with the historical violence of forced sterilization on queer people by the occupying states. Dormancy or repose, is not the same as unproductivity—Guamán Poma and his uncredited scribes and elders showed us this beautifully, in their planting ceremony illustrations.
…
This is why we listen to the tree, the bud, pankara, the butterfly, snail, ant, cricket, the trash, the river, the road that we set foot upon every day as stem, where we, as sariri, relay Tunupa, who they say changed from man to woman across the water, seemingly walking alone, only paired or connected across spacetimes. Recall the elders’ famous saying, translated as: “Do not pity q’iwa people, because they walk looking at the stars.” As mentioned, the last time we spoke, balance is a matter of perspective.
…
The pachanaka, or manifold spacetimes, stained us, jiwasa, before the creation of the World over our mother, the earth. Like titi, we were already stained before Europe arrived to these lands—very speckled, muy pintado, to quote elder Pachacuti again. This is the bittersweet red song, the lonely q’iwa melody, the transnocturnal huayño, the blood-red penumbra that spilled out as the chullpas mistakenly sang the first sunrise, seeing each other for the first time, individuated in sadness and joy, shared aloneness, speaking with tears, our first language: the birth of the mundo en policía, the policed world.
…
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: Our languages have been colonized, our philosophers have been killed, our theorists have been killed, and we have been left with nothing but degraded words, only words reduced to their pragmatic meanings. Then it’s up to the new generations.
…
Because the thing about the potency of ch’ixi is that it’s indeterminate. It is neither male nor female, it is neither above nor below, but it is both at the same time.
It is both male and female, it is both above and below. So how can this be transferred to the human? One can be in two forms. Ch’i—The pronunciation is a little difficult because there is ch’ixi with aspirate [pronunciation] and there is ch’ixi with explosive [pronunciation]. Ch’ixi is soft, it is unlearned. And I’ve made it more understandable with the notion of Pa’churrima divided heart, divided soul like the “double bind” that Gayatri Spivak talks about, right? I mean, “double bind” is when you have one identity mandate and you have the opposite mandate. You have the mandate to be white, and you have the mandate to be Indigenous. And they are in a clash. But that causes schizophrenia, social schizophrenia, collective schizophrenia, and personal schizophrenia. And the ways to cure these schizophrenias are to find [how] to live with the contradiction of having this identity that has two roots. They force you to choose one to deny the other, and I refuse to ignore the fact that I am also white, that I also have European roots, and that I do not regret it because I am not to blame for having been born that way. So I want to liberate myself by recognizing the best, the most profoundly contentious of both dimensions.
Waȟpániča
by Layli Long Soldier
I begin a line about white buttes that bend chiseled faces and click stone eyelids at night, but abandon it. Instead, I push my love into this world and mail you a summer letter. From mailbox to door, you read the commas aloud. I’ve become a wife of bottled water comma black liner at the lash comma and sleeves to the wrist. These weeks alone alone alone comma I pull my body to a table of empty chairs and sometimes I cannot stop the impulse to command. Alone alone I instruct sit down comma eat up comma and I write in detail to hush an echo comma the rupture of a fault line.
•
I wanted to write about waȟpániča a word translated into English as poor comma which means more precisely to be destitute to have nothing of one’s own. But tonight I cannot bring myself to swing a worn hammer at poverty to pound the conditions of that slow frustration. So I ask what else is there to hear? A comma instructs me to divide a sentence. To pause. The comma orders a sequence of elements the comma is caesura itself. The comma interrupts me with, quiet.
•
Father’s Day comma I am not with you. I stare at a black-and-white photo of you comma my husband in a velvet shirt comma your hair tied back and your eyes on the face of our sleeping daughter. When I write comma I come closer to people I want to know comma to the language I want to speak.
•
Then a friend remarks When we speak comma question marks dashes lines little black dots or jiggle in the air before us comma in truth it’s the rise and fall of the voice we must capture to mean a thing in writing. Leaning his head toward a page with some vulnerable line he adds And isn’t it interesting how a comma can tip a phrase into sentimentality.
•
So I disassemble mechanics comma how to score sound music movement across the page. I watch the compassionate comma slow the singular mind of two lovers. When we cannot speak our mind the comma will cool will sigh it will lick an envelope for us. Because the tongue of a comma is detached, patient.
•
Yet I feel forced to decide if poor really means brittle hands dust and candy-stained mouths a neighbor girl’s teeth convenience store shelves Hamburger Helper a dog’s matted fur a van seat pulled to the living room floor those children playing in the carcass of a car mice on the floorboard my sweeping chill hantavirus the ripe smell a horse chewed ripped its backbone exposed the swarms of do-gooders their goodly photos the heat the cold the drunks we pass waving dollar bills again tonight a bang on the door the stories no one here can stop the urge to tell I am buried in. This is the cheapest form of poor I decide it’s the oil at the surface I’m tempted to say it. But a friend asserts that anyone asserting that poverty isn’t about money has never been stomach-sick over how to spend their last $3 comma on milk or gas or half for both with two children in the backseat watching. I agree to let meanings and arguments with my head thrust into the punctuation of poverty here, breathe.
•
Because waȟpániča means to have nothing of one’s own. Nothing. Yet I intend the comma to mean what we do possess so I slow myself to remember it’s true a child performs best when bonded with a parent before the age of five closely comma intimately. Next to you comma our daughter closes her eyes and you rest your heads blue-black lakes comma historic glass across the pillow. She’ll keep this. And if it’s true that what begins as trouble will double over to the end will raise its head as a period to our sentence then I admit I perform best to the music in between the rise and fall of the voice. Nevertheless I dig through my pockets dresser drawers bookshelves comma meticulous picking comma because I must write it to see it comma how I beg from a dictionary to learn our word for poor comma in a language I dare to call my language comma who am I. A sweeping chill my stained mouth just oil at the surface comma because I feel waȟpániča I feel alone. But this is a spill-over translation for how I cannot speak my mind comma the meta-phrasal ache of being language poor.
The Economy by Ariana Reines
I didn’t love
That I had this
Tendency
Toward melody
Or the appetite for drama
Always obvious
In my thinking
& in everything
I did. I wasn’t TV
Though I watched myself
Sometimes passively
As though brained or
Bludgeoned out of the fullness
Of my own reality. I felt
I had to respect what seduced me
Even if stupidly—even when it made
Me stupid—or meant I was—
Making of my mind a begging bowl
Laying myself waste for the devil
Making an innocent victim of the child within
So ferociously did I fear
Something adult, like sovereignty
Survival was a big-
Box-store-bought
Blanket. Not wet
But scented
With the antiseptics
Of the factory
It would take days
To air out, get it to resemble
The picture of something homey
And grandmother-made
I know what it’s like to pay
Money for such.
The three-dimensional
Image of things. To find
Them feeling hollow and smelling
Wrong. I know what it’s like.
The imitation of life.
I almost know what it means.
I disciplined my own form and the thinking
Within me. That may not be a religion
But it is grim theology.
The more muscle I had the better
I felt I could contain and conduct
The sorrow within. The smoother
Ran my blood and lymph.
My body dismayed me and I hated,
Adored it. Recurrent dreams
Of defective dolls kept coming back
To warn me. You are not a thing.
You are not the object against which forces
Tilt that you cannot control.
You are the entire subject of the world.
Tears rolled down a cheek of stone
My friend Terry writes about water
And land, mother and brother
Like a singer. I once despaired
To her that the only endangered
Species I had managed to speak
On behalf of up to that moment
Was myself. This seemed squalid
And narrow to me. Terry said it was real
Territory. I blinked melancholy
Into the seething night
Like a spotted owl in the eye
Of a security camera
Black and white bird without
Offspring or prey. My body
Is filled with plastic
I left my mother to die
To write these lines
You will parry that such is a false
Economy. But so
Are all the other ones we live by