Breath, Blood, Throat, Voice: Tanya Tagaq and the Politics of Song

This is an audio capture of a collaborative presentation by Bronwyn Malloy and me—both affiliated with the University of British Columbia—on the music of Tanya Tagaq (along with that of Jesse Zubot, Jean Martin and Christine Duncan). The talk, called "Breath, Blood, Throat, Voice: Tanya Tagaq and the Politics of Song," took place on Friday, 24 March 2017 at the University of British Columbia. In keeping with our subject matter—Tagaq’s recent music, especially from the album Retribution, and live performances—we tried to design our own presentation as a co-creative duo, moving back and forth between voices and approaches. Our intention is to revise and expand this material into a collaborative scholarly-critical essay. We're focusing in on the collisions of indigeneity and alterity/plurality/community through the co-creative practice(s) of improvised musicking.

Close Careful Trans Listening: Pauline Oliveros, Joe McPhee and Rachel Pollack's Unquenchable Fire

I read this paper—“Close Careful Trans Listening: Pauline Oliveros, Joe McPhee, and Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire”—on June 3, 2017 at the Montreal colloquium for the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation: Still Listening—A Series of Events in Memory of Pauline Oliveros. For me, it represents a first foray into an intersectional social aesthetics, drawing together transgender writing—in particular, Pollack’s speculative fiction—with queer theory and the practice of deep listening. As I point out, the paper leans a little toward Oliveros, despite the composition and recording being principally credited to Joe McPhee. I also need to develop more fully and carefully a reading of the theology of annunciation and its relationship to gendered bodies and the dynamics of consent and the discursive power of the speech act.

You might also want to check out Still Listening, the on-line exhibition of a series of 85 85-second compositions dedicated to Pauline Oliveros.

Oh, and if you want a copy of the music, you can buy it from Joe McPhee's Bandcamp page, here.

Posthumous Errata for Tom Raworth

An obituary for Tom Raworth appeared in this Sunday's issue of The Guardian. His website at present appears to have been taken down: consigned maybe to the transitory dissolution of language, its entropy, to which his poetry was so closely attentive. He had died in early February, but I was either busy or distracted, or likely both, and I missed any notice. The last I had heard from him was a mass-emailed season's greeting in December, 2015. He was brilliant and under-recognized. His writing has played a sizeable part in my scholarly and teaching life, and his poetry has strongly impacted my own practice. 

Some years ago, I mistook at first reading the last text in his 2010 collection Windmill in Flames — an "Errata to Collected Poems (2003)" — for a poem itself, a misprision that I think Raworth might have encouraged. What might or might not constitute a poem, and who might do that constituting, remained a playfully and vitally provocative question for him. In 2012, I was working on a set of still-unseen visual-typographical poems, which I want to call Typos, and one of them is a reworking of this errata page, and my goofy error. I'd like to offer it up here as a tribute to Tom Raworth.

Some Country Music (poetry)

It has been more than a few months since I last posted. Well, yes. Here is an impromptu piece composed yesterday in reaction to the American election. More things to come when I can.

Some Country Music (for Wednesday 9 November 2016)

Place of lost welcome, place of faithlessness, place of the disenfranchised, place of glib hunger, walled off place, place of broken windows, place of honey, place of gouged certainties, place of barely invisible menace, place of unrequited promises, place of vinyl siding, despondent place, place of recycled batteries, place of scorched all-season radials, place of without, of the less-than-remarkable, place of uneven hygiene, stolen place, place of dissolving hazards, place of smeared lipstick, place of tossed-off b-sides, place of jeans with the knees torn out, tongue-in-groove place, place of small mercies, place of the difficult, that and not this place, place of compassionate hatreds, place of leaky pipelines, place of the backward and the unredeemed, another place, place of the more-or-less, place of coal-fired remorse, place of chained bicycles, place of a few more regrets than you thought you had, place of stale ketchup-flavoured potato chips, punk place, place of the awful and brave, place of stark miracles, place of poorly sutured gunshot wounds, someone else’s place, place of comb-overs, place of flight risks, uncharted place, place of robust decrepitude, place of sweet fritters, unlikely place, place of the remainders, place of special sauce, place of conflicted dreams, place of beatings, place of income splitting, place of diversified wants, place of barren shelves, of selective plenitude, unthinkable place, place of cracking asphalt, place of various plastics, unspeakable or unspoken place, place of adoptive parents, place of hatreds, place of cinched foreign aid, place of disheveled love, of amateur pornography, long-haired place, place of manicured lawns, place of unrepaired elevators, place of cream corn, place of unqualified expertise, place of the quick, this mortal place, place of almost, place of everyone’s worst nightmare but your own, place of loss and profit and loss again, place of bleak water, place of deficits, place of contaminant-free topsoil, place of deadfall, place of stillness, place of thin government, place of rampant loneliness, deplorable unceded place, place of discarded cellophane wrappers, place of careless attraction, place of risk, pride of place, place of cheap stainless steel, place of fallen stars and wheat futures, agnostic place, no better place, place of refuge, place of excluded hearts, place of fraught witness, place of those who can laugh and weep at the same time.

Anthony Davis at the Western Front, 24 March 2016

What a privilege to hear Anthony Davis play two sets of solo piano at the Western Front last night. His performance—a return to Vancouver after thirty years—also marked the release of past - piano - present, an LP anthology of audio recordings from the Western Front’s archive featuring tracks by Anthony Davis, Paul Plimley, Al Neil and John Kameel Farah.

In her sleeve notes, pianist Dana Reason notes how, in his 1985 performance of “Behind the Rock,” Davis’s “ease mobilizing and maximizing the piano . . . suggests a careful study of Duke Ellington’s rich orchestral tradition.” Not that Davis’s playing sounds studied or academic; his aesthetic – his performance style and his method – seems to offer an idiosyncratic mix of (what George Lewis has called) Eurological and Afrological sensibilities, blurring composition and improvisation, chamber music and blues, Olivier Messiaen and James P. Johnson, recital and gig, to generate a vital, kinetic music of layered possibilities. He played two sets lasting almost an hour each. The first set opened with a piece built from variations on cascading intervals, which Davis later identified as fragments from his composition Wayang No. IV. The second piece, which Davis did not identify, spun magisterially through components of what felt like a 32-bar song, unpacking and reassembling melody with a recognizably Ellingtonian grandeur. The third piece was a version of “Ankle and Wrist” from his 1997 opera Amistad; built on shards of a blues motif, the music surged in swathes gathered and propelled by Davis’s powerful sustain pedal, while his strong left hand offered up lines recalling Sir Roland Hanna or Earl Hines. Davis’s touch is fierce and firm, but he also has a keen capacity for tenderness, as the concluding piece of the first set, a gently deconstructed jazz waltz, suggested. 
The second set opened with what he called his “Goddess Variations,” improvisations developed around the “orchestral material” from the aria “They come as if from the heavens (Goddess of the Waters),” also from Amistad. He followed with an extended wordless version of “Five Moods from an English Garden,” a work he described composing when he found himself stranded in Munich – after touring with violinist Leroy Jenkins – sleeping on a studio floor; on a snowy May morning, he said, he walked through the city’s English Gardens – listening to birdcalls – and into an exhibit of Wassily Kandinsky paintings – “moods” – at a gallery there. The composition draws on these two palettes to create a vivid tone poem. The closing piece from the second set involved a return to Wayang No. IV, extending Davis’s exploration of the material in intense overlaid chords to produce what felt like kinetic densities, a powerfully mobile aural weave.  As an encore for an enthusiastic, deeply engaged audience, Davis played a remarkable meditative version of “Monk’s Mood,” a suitably elegant and resonant conclusion to a brilliant concert.

Noticing and/as Listening in Edgelands and Wool

Here is some text composed for a lecture for my current class on “Denatured Reading.” I’m making a transtition between Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (2011) and Hugh Howey’s novel Wool (2012).

Because of its subject matter and its project, Edgelands is a book its collaborative authors are unable to finish. The last of its seemingly ad hoc jumble of twenty-eight segments—“chapters” feels like too tidy a word for the various unruly trajectories Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts trace through England’s inter-urban spaces—begins by disavowing closure as something fundamentally at odds with these transitional and unfixed terrains: “So where do the edgelands end? How far can the idea take us?” (261). They offer, in place of any conclusion, only another contingent figure, the abandoned and collapsing pier. Humanity marks the limits of its fraught and absurdly enervated dominion over place by extending its spindly architectures off-shore, although, as Roberts and Farley resignedly note, you still can’t tether the tide (262). As a kind of enactment of this futility, they describe the thrill-seeking art of “tombstoning . . . jumping from height into the sea” as a way of testing our human, mortal and English limits:

Piers are among the most inviting of springboards for a jump, but also the most dangerous, as tides can pull the jumper out to sea quickly, or smash them against the iron legs and supports. It’s common for tombstoners to scream as they fall, as if their captive souls have been reintroduced to the wild, albeit only for a second or two, before they hit the water. (263)

Some jumpers, they tell us, “punch themselves in the face, very hard,” a bleakly comedic reminder of the consequences of anthropocentric hubris. The indifference of the inhuman world—uninhabitable all but briefly—manifests itself in the recalcitrant decrepitude and feral reclamation of whatever people try to make or do. Piers represent a last land-bound effort to rationalize and to master the inhuman world and also offer stages on which to enact our temporary, imaginary release from our mortal limits into wild, animal being. The last passage of the book emerges from a description of their visit to the West Pier at Brighton “just months before it suffers a fatal collapse and a series of fires and is closed,” hinting at the fatal finish in burnt-out rubbish—the deferred but inevitable closure—to which all human endeavor in the edgelands seems to come: but that small apocalypse lies in the future, outside the bounds of their writing. Instead, they focus on the gloomy, birdshit spattered remains of the “Laughterland” arcade in the deserted pavilion at the outer end of the pier; connecting the interloping birds, starlings, etymologically with the “sterling” admission prices “still painted on the wall,” they “notice for the first time,” in the book’s last sentence, that the walls had once been painted “a very watery blue, the colour, in fact, of a starling’s egg” (264). Against the lugubrious and moribund image of decaying carcasses (both birds and architecture), they offer an attentive glimpse of oceanic albumen and of these remains as a promise of rebirth, as hybrid human-animal gestation, as egg. The work of noticing that their prose undertakes, even in passing, wants both to describe and to enact—in the verbal textures of their conversation—what I want to think of as an edgelands poetics.

         That work of noticing seems primarily visual throughout the book, but I want to make a case that it’s as much aural as it is ocular, a honed form of listening both to other human voices and to that world’s often incomprehensible soundscape. In “Wire,” they imagine bundles of taken-down chain-link fence as decommissioned memory coils, holding “recordings” of ambient sounds from the past. In “Masts,” they meditate on the “multiple text messages, wireless e-mails and mobile phone calls cutting through” our bodies if we stand anywhere near transmission towers—which have been located in the edgelands as far as possible from “schools and homes” for fear of the dire, mortal effect all that electromagnetic energy can have on us (133). Still, Farley and Roberts nudge us: “Listen to them whisper as they pass through you. Take on the cares of the world.” They seem to want an impossible acuity, a noticing beyond human capacities; but really, what we’re invited to listen for is exactly that—the limits of our attentiveness, of our ability to care and to feel ourselves implicated in these contact zones, these all-too-inhuman spaces. Finally, it turns out, it’s the starlings who come to provide a tenuously viable model for this poetics of listening. In the book’s penultimate section, “Weather,” Farley and Roberts remark on starlings’ ability to be “keen mimics” of whatever they hear: “They’re the samplers among our avifauna, able to incorporate all manner of human, animal and mechanical sounds into their repertoire, and urban starlings are well know copyists of telephones and doorbells, even dial-up modems” (258-9). In their terms, these starling imitations are moments of absurd comedy, audio witness of a feral reabsorption of human technocracy, but they are also instances, they suggest, of the mutating, fractured archive of human presence, an organic version of the chin-link memory coils that still retains vestigial potential to be decoded, heard, observed, noticed:

Starlings have been observed at abandoned human settlements recreating the noises of former human or mechanical activity: a squeaky water-pump, even though the pump is long seized up, or the rasp of a bandsaw, even though the woodshed is long deserted. Could it be that the starlings that gather here sing a song made from bits of the area’s former soundscape? . . . The area has always been a kind of edgelands, but could it be possible that starlings still carry within their complicated songs some of the sound elements of that former industrial world? Thought of this way, the birds themselves are a kind of information storage system, a winged databank. (259)

The watery blue paint on the walls of the West Pier’s pavilion gestures metaphorically and materially at the starling’s re-populating of waste space not only with their own living murmurations but also with the re-created echoes of human habitation. It’s this sort of lyric performative archive that Farley and Roberts want to sound in their sentences, in their verbal desire paths, their lines.

         We’re making a transition today, according to the syllabus, from reading Edgelands to Hugh Howey’s speculative fiction in Wool. While we’re shifting genres and, arguably, prose styles as we move from one book to the other, I want to note in Howey’s opening story a few key connections and articulated joints, chiefly around this poetics of noticing. The world of the silo—or of the siloes, as we’ll find out—juxtaposes a panopticon-like architecture (recall Farley and Roberts’s repeated invocations of panoptic surveillance) that governs and sustains human survival by maintaining clear boundaries between the technologically managed interior of the human space and the poisoned and deadly world of the post-natural outside; the hill we glimpse in the images of the exterior world—through illusions of transparent windows that are actually faulty projections made by data projectors on opaque, curved subterranean walls—marks the physiographic mortal limit of human life, as far as those who have been sent out to clean the lenses of the electronic cameras can possibly walk before their bodies give out. Those boundaries are marked by not only by technological illusion—and everyone in the silo appears to recognize that, while presumably accurate depictions of the outer world, those images are also artificial and contrived, signaled by the wear and breakdown of the image into “dead pixels” here and there—but also false consciousness:

a handful of dead pixels . . . stood stark white against all the brown and gray hues. Shining with ferocious intensity, each pixel . . . was like a square window to some brighter place, a hole the width of a human hair that seemed to beckon toward some better reality. (9)

Sherriff Holston’s wife Allison, digging into corrupted, overwritten, archaic and deleted electronic databases, thinks she has uncovered a conspiracy, on the part of the silo’s IT directorate, to manipulate those images (“Nothing you see is real” [26]), and both she and Holston come to believe they understand why those exiled to their deaths through the silo airlock turn back to clean the lenses—because they want the others to see the outside world as they are certain they now see it: cartoonishly pastoral, a world of natural beauty kept hidden from the silo’s inhabitants in order to keep them inside, their bodies docile, law-abiding and well-governed. This is, of course, a fatal mistake—the visuals of a perfect spring landscape are projected on their helmets’ viewscreens to trick them into cleaning, to fool them into walking out of their own volition. The edge or verge into which they walk is a virtual landscape, an overlay of visual membrane masking the decimation of outlying space – think of their proximity to and distance from the destroyed city on the horizon—with an illusion of manicured garden, a space in which nature never did betray the heart that loved her. Once that membrane—screen or suit—becomes porous or breached, the realization that the planet has become an inherently inhuman twilight zone dawns on Holston as a question both of seeing and being seen: “What would they see, anyone who had chosen to watch?” (39). Reality and illusion collapse into each other. “Holston could see,” but what he sees is exactly what he thought he didn’t.

         Notably, too, what initiates this collapse—which is both a realization or groundtruthing and a reinscription of false consciousness—is a speech-act and a moment of public listening. In this world, you break the law and condemn yourself by asking, publically, to go outside: “I want to go out” (23). This demand is both perlocution and illocution, a command that enacts, as it’s pronounced, its own sentencing. When Allison speaks the fatal words, Holston tries to quiet her, but also knows “it was too late. The others had heard. Everyone had heard. His wife had signed her own death certificate” (24). Noticing, in this space, offers only a warrant for execution. But, as the four posthumous sequels emerge from each other as the novel unfolds, we discover that moments of noticing—hearing voices from the other siloes, decoding messages, understanding what the fragment of computer code Allison uncovered actually does mean—are also key to the unveiling and debunking of the coercive governance of siloed humanity, a vital disillusionment that, unfortunately, both Allison and Holston don’t have enough information to comprehend or to challenge. What their speech-acts do accomplish, however, is to open a crack, to prize apart the fatal flaw in their worn, decrepit hegemony. They begin to make the instability audible, like the small skew we’ll hear in Juliette’s well-oiled and carefully-repaired generator.