Hallock Hill

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.)