Music

Echo Locution: Aural / Environment / Body / Poetics - Part 1 /  by James belflower

Maryam Parhizkar, David James Miller & James Belflower

At the Disembodied Poetics Conference: Writing/Thinking/Being at Naropa University, in October, 2014 David James Miller, Maryam Parhizkar, and myself discussed the influence of music on our critical and creative writing practices in a panel titled "Echo Locution: Aural / Environment / Body / Poetics." The conversation afterward was very rewarding and there were many questions about the various textual and musical sources referenced. To say thanks, and to keep that conversation going, we've posted a brief summary of our talks and a list of resources from our papers. This is the first of three parts. We hope you enjoy!

To Know Noise Is to Know Another: Luc Ferrari's Sound Newspaper Far West News

James Belflower

The Italian-born French composer Luc Ferrari was pivotal in the musique concrète scene emerging in Postwar France, which was characterized by the use of found sound, tape manipulations, and extended instrumentation. From one of his first found sound experiments in Danse Organiques (1971-73), which recorded two women making love, to his extended aural travelogue of he and his wife’s tour through the Southwest in the late 1990s, Far West News (1998-99), Ferrari provocatively pulled intimate noise into an historical period where abstract methods of music composition dominated the European and American scenes. In Far West News, Ferrari employs found sound, minimalist editing, and a variety of innovative compositional techniques to create a Sound Newspaper, a haunting "ambiguous realism" composed from recordings of his sightseeing tours, conversations, and ambient audio during their trip. Contrary to the alienation noise typically provokes, Far West News suggests that an encounter with noise is instead a form of communication rich with intimacy. Ferrari's meticulous, sensitive, and hands-on approach to collecting and composing with found sound demonstrates that when we consider noise as deeply relational it allows us to practice non-referential and comparitivist approaches to reality through our senses. Ultimately, noisy encounters encourage us to understand how resonances of all varieties inflect materiality by engendering sonic affinities between human and non-human players in what Ferrari called the "dialectics of the everyday."

Abner Jay: Sexuality in a Different Key /  by James belflower

Abner Jay courtesy of Charlie Vinz

Abner Jay courtesy of Charlie Vinz

Walter Benjamin said that there is no better trigger for thinking than laughter. Abner Jay, the self-proclaimed "last working southern black minstrel," takes this to heart on his album One Man Band when he asks such urgent questions as "What do you give an elephant with diarrhea? Answer, plenty of room!" Giggling at the moral ruts we often find ourselves in, Abner alternates short immoral anecdotes and one-liners about suicide by train, marriage, child rearing, venereal disease, The Vietnam War, Australia, rock n' roll, virility pills, bestiality, military history, cocaine use, along with jokes that both reinforce and swerve to critique the sexual assumptions they chew on. What I love about One Man Band is that although it is not quite in the goofy exotica genre, it maintains a comic drift between the sexual repression and the hyper sexism often associated with bible thumping movements. His scope of innuendo is impressive, but it is the odd and poetic stories between songs that trigger a downright awkward but self-reflexive chuckle, amplified by his bluesy bends.

Three highlights from this album: VD, I'm A Hard Working Man, and Wee Wee. VD is hilariously contaminated with the dangers of the "pre-honeymoon" in Abner's  impassioned diatribe against the dangers of sex before marriage. I'm A Hard Working Man grunts its way through a fusion of blues and eroticism (I'm still unsure which), and Wee Wee finishes by crooning us back to those wonderful days when urination was a pleasure in itself.

In the extended vein of early self-titled Scott Walker recordings and The Frogs' Made Up Songs, the iconoclastic Abner Jay is a performer who implicitly and explicitly mocks himself, along with poking at the normativity of male heterosexuality. Plucking, thumping, and inveighing, his humor and music provoke laughter as the initial stage of critique. He causes us to reconsider what can be done about those "TUUUUUUUURRRRRRRIBLE things" that may happen when you're caught "putting your things together!"

See more biographical information about Abner Jay here.

The Last Ole Minstrel Abner Jay plays his last gig at the Grassroots Festival in Trumansburg, New York.