Hallock Hill

Keith Fullerton Whitman, excerpt from split LP with Mike Shiflet (Amethyst Sunset, 2010)

Her eyes looked like woodsmoke. Shoeless. A waving shock of hair uncontrived and yet purposeful and in her the sounds of as many trees and waves as I could hold in my head. Woodsmoke eyes. Alighted. Dark ombre of twisting color ribboned upwards, as she looked upwards, away from me I must admit and towards a lost thought. I could only imagine.

When I took her hand and she curled her fingers round mine I was instantly absent minded and my own eyes surely wilted. Nonsense. Or at least nonsensical. We both quickly smiled. We were standing in a hot puddle behind the cemetery where the teachers couldn’t find us. Or at least, wouldn’t.

I can remember the way the sun looked that day and the monument of humidity that was around us. Questions about dinner time and what we would eat and who we would sit with and were we going to go to the library and thank god there’s only two more weeks of school and then what. God it was hot and filled with an unbinding confusion.

Ultimately the sand in the base of that puddle, which was really a shallow tributary of a stream behind the school, got to us and we realized we had to leave. Walk back down the hill to the buildings and landscaping and curbs and sidewalks and fences.

We met sitting in a windowless room reading short stories. Her roommate told me to love her in a darkroom. She told me in a darkroom.

That day ended and ended, I’m not sure now. Who can expect me to know which day was the one I’ve been thinking about? Or you’ve been thinking about? All these sounds and silences, wrapped in tissues of time and guarded by wrinkled memories of her, each other, one’s self.

(Limited LP release. Find it directly from Amethyst Sunset or Mike Shiflet.)

Side 1: Keith Fullerton Whitman: live analog synthesizer
Side 2: Mike Shiflet: live guitar and oscillator

The above was written as I listened to Whitman’s piece for the first time.  The first sentence was generated when I first saw the cover.

These Feathers Have Plumes, “Vortex,” Corvidae (Tartaruga Records, 2010)

Close to the pleasures of the world, under a glossy black sky.  Slack clouds hang within the silence of the space.  With this, it could sacrifice itself, or rub against its own ardent desire, if only so it may then die.  It could even smack against the very purpose of its being and still not reveal the full pleasure of just knowing it is there. Seeking this absolute advantage, to hoist a flag and let it stand for the power to prey upon its own energy.  Even the machinist, whose smock is dirtied in the practice of craft, could not touch its energy, which is past and incomplete.  Its energy began operating in the depths of its desperation, devouring and seizing all that it could.  Such was the shock of touching it.  The results came at any cost and so it consumed itself.  It shook.  A self-consuming artifact, made possible by a chance, a glimpse into a spire that rotated around a central axis, as if stalking the flesh of the carrion that lived within its spiral.  The other axes shoot in four directions, perpendicular to the center.  Its pomp and riches could not succeed, for its image, hoisted upon the flag, became the image of improvidence.  In its short life, its pleasures, the ways of its operation, eyes fell into this grave mechanism and found the secret there.  The gears that warped its axis existed solely to betray the fact of its self-betrayal.  The sky once hit the shore and betrayed the boundary.  The betrayal was betrayed.  Not as if some whore came into the fray and twisted it around her body; the actual event was much more subtle.  Its corroded operations seized up and drank no more, as if the oasis of its desperation was nothing other than an emergence into consciousness.  The whole of its living slipped into another space, yet linked with that sky that seemed the only constant.  Perhaps, though, it failed because it was wrapped around the occupation of robbing that which had animated it.  And while what is made can be seen, the making is never revealed.  Made desirous, it peered through a slit in the perspective, made an attempt at measuring and annotating every other procedure that was at play.  It could not find the white envelope that supposedly contained the secrets of its existence. The pleasures of the world, fortunately they were simple.  Love could not be measured and it was sure love was there.  It had learned to speak and utter that inexhaustible breath.  And though its words were to stand in a lone hollow, amidst the dale they took shape and said something.  The breath spiraled about the wondrous economy of its design.  The lane formed by the twisted axes remained, if only for an instant, whole.  And yet it was spent.  It was late and past the time to find the envelope.  The sky betrayed the constellation, disrupting the glossy black.  Its hate was a thing, enclosed in a parcel of betrayal.  Its speech obscured by the inability to begin.  The secret, like the grail itself, kept eluding its gaze.  Its operation sacrificed, exaggerated in its suspension.  Every grain was lost.  And as it shattered, there was the ineffable modal sound of existence surging out through the cracks.  In the workings of its brain, there was the final peace of knowing it had been.  Glossy under the word, the sky, close to the black pleasures, took the form of a transparent envelope.

(Absolutely gorgeous packaging, an edition of 100, and a very fine sound world : Tartaruga Records / These Feathers Have Plumes.)

The Caretaker, “False Memory Syndrome,” Persistent Repetition of Phrases (History Always Favours the Winners, 2010 reissue, originally released by Install, 2008)

I dip my toe into the stream and in that moment when the water parts and diverts round my skin I hear a distant echo of the past. I feel it too, in the coolness of the water, and see a reflection of the tree behind me, warped by the undulations of the water and the complicated visual field of the rocks at riverbed.

Finding it difficult to merely experience the moment, with thoughts creating to-do lists and recalling doings forgotten, I stare intently at just the tip of my toe, now submerged. I take out a leaf I’d put in my pocket earlier and toss it into the rushing water. Gone. It is a past thought now gone, I can hear it float away.

My sons are downstream in the swimming hole. I am above the light run of rapids, shallow water defined by larger rocks that form the orchestra of this place. Their intermittent hollers percuss the air, piping exclamations of life within the endless flow of time that rolls over my toe, quickly, and past them, slowly. It is the same river, but no drop of it the same as any other.

I try and imagine imaginary origins of words, place names. The while my toe punctures the surface of the water. Alive. My grandparents are dead. I can hear them laughing at my sons. My great aunt is standing across the river with a drink in her hand and she’s asking them if the water is cold. And they answer her. Nothing is cold.

This all happens in the wink of an eye, an eye I am not sure is mine.

(A new approach to reacting to music, perhaps.)