Preamble
On the Discus CD Fluvium, the collaboration of Martin Archer
and Julie Tippets with Geraldine Monk is close in that Monk is for the first
time performing with them, and she is working with a complex text, free of the
expectations of ‘song’, unlike the earlier Angel
High Wires. The ‘text’ of a multisystemic formal reading of this ‘fused
sonics’ must include this text on the page (even this is offered to us in book
publication and in the CD sleevenotes with slight variations) and the music as
it is heard on the CD. (It is not separately notated; Archer works directly on
his materials and, as with earlier work, incorporates acts of improvisation
into the overall poesis undertaken in the studio). This includes the
performance of that text, along with the grain of the voice (here with the
presence of the author and another voice, one speaking, the other singing,
although that distinction is not held to rigidly in the mix), and with every
other element of organised sound (to appropriate John Cage’s catch-all definition
of music) taken into account: ‘fused sonics (interaction)’ (to use some terms
from Monk’s poetics, Insubstantial
Thoughts on the Transubstantiation of the Text. I posted the (exhaustively)
long version of my account of this on Pages
(first of 5 installments here).
These involve acts of risk, the
clash of two (or more) formal disciplines, formal practices, formal languages,
and the effect may not be of systems working purposefully together but of
working against one another; they run the risk of ‘Sonic v semantic’ (another
term from the poetics). To adapt the information theory of Yuri Lotman, the
recording as experienced is a multi-systemic artefact, where all elements
operate with some degree of autonomy from all others. The resultant complexity,
the interinanimation (and non-interinanimation) of its forms, is formed in a
multi-sensory act of readerly forming, so that the forming of it because its
performance and the trace of that event its meaning. Responding to the Monk poem
being recited, to adapt Attridge’s remark, involves performing the particular
performance of it that I am hearing. Responding to the Monk poem being recited as
part of a recorded composition by Martin Archer involves performing the
particular performance of it that I am hearing on the recording which, after
several hearings, is a composite one.[i]
Fluvium
What follows here are my notes,
made listening to the recording, and then immediately ‘cleaned up’ for style
and sense. Otherwise, for this post, they have not been changed, other than
adding the correct spelling of the Stockhausen piece. Monk’s text was not
consulted. The words in inverted commas are what I heard, or thought I heard
Monk say, or sing. A generous sample may be heard here.
Espial
Archer’s buckled electronics start
the piece off, though is there a voice, some sampled trace of utterance, in the
jerking word-like chimes, or ringing? Not sure. Glissandi, gratings and swoops
crowd together, build up. A single piano note is struck, then returns sampled, several
times, transformed, as Monk’s whispers begin, a brief sound at first, but then
she clearly recites the text, in a whisper surrounded by, swamped by,
outnumbered by electronics (and, a little after, by multi-tracked sax). There
are deft and grand electronic sounds that remind me of Stockhausen’s ‘Gesang
der Jünglinge’, but this is the home-brew version (I mean: what took hours in Darmstadt in the 1950s
can be done on a lap top today). ‘Lush lush.’ The saxes return with a rondo
that sounds like the World Saxophone Quartet, though perhaps more out there like
SOS from the 1970s or the Rova ensemble today. Archer will know that. (Brief
memory that he name-checks the Soft Machine.) But electronic noises like JLIAT’s
thunder and crash there too. The WSQ sound emerges and electronic voicings
(literally voices, treated, I think; they cannot be understood) speak over the
rondo, which then fades and leaves not silence but a low hum. A space opens, fills
with oscillating electronics, a piano note, but it’s preparing for a concentrated
and longer reading from Monk: I hear ‘raparapraprparaparp’ (echoed, sampled).
The voice recites close. I hear the music of ‘lips lit lips lit’. ‘Dark dark:
dark dark’: repeated like that, before a return to the chorus of ‘raparapraprparaparp.’
‘Is there anybody there?’ is repeated 4 times. It sounds desperate because
there is no reply, not even musically.
Fusile
A pure electronic tone (though
interrupted constantly) leads to a juddery fade. We hear a deep indiscernible male-sounding
voice and a continuous dirty tone (like a vacuum cleaner) though the pure tone
briefly recurs. The guttering low sounds may be speech slowed even further than
male-ness. (The voice must be either Monk’s or Tippetts’, if it’s a voice at
all.) Tippetst enters, sighingly, improvising one of her melodies that always
sound vaguely eastern, a plaint to be sure. Electronics pop (low), saxes repeat
a rondo-like riff, a melodica enters and fades. The sax and voice popping
against one another continues for some time. An insistent low tone; then Monk
reads, slowly, emphatically, close-miked, over the same kinds of sounds as just
described. Did she breathe ‘BREATHE’? ‘It is seethe,’ she intones, as the
backing textures build in volume, Tippetts breaking into throat-singing and
falsettos, louder. ‘Slo-mo blink,’ does she say? Snarling, breathing low. Two
Tippett voices improvise behind her and around the repeating melodica. Monk’s
voice stumbles, the singing chirps and blips, ‘Is it?’ It’s like birdsong,
chittering in confusion. ‘What is it?’ the voices (both, all) cry. ‘It’s like
like like like … it’s like animals,’ I hear, but Monk is off on a roll, dancing
down a long stretch of language (as I’ve heard her do in dozens of solo readings)
and Tippetts glides over the speech, tracking it, it seems. The track segues
into the next…
Ghast
Is that breathing? ‘It was a very
very very (Monk’s tones lowering with each iteration) curled up beer mat.’ The
voice is clear with arpeggios of warm electronics surrounding it, chilling to a
glissando which slides up towards inaudibility and goes. ‘Time dripped
unnoticed and then and then it stopped. Blotted out…..etc.’ The text is
clear, slow enough to write it down, not just listen to it, though Monk
elongates a word here and there and it merges into sound, is lost. Every new
cluster of words evokes electronic build up: a break in one dictates a break in
the other. The music and sound are following the words, or more precisely,
following the voice, Monk’s speaking voice. This continues throughout. ‘TAKE
ANY SHAPE,’ Monk cries, a grainy voice. A sudden solo sax is clear behind the
voice, adopts trills and sliding: Monk went ‘looking for night’ (we hear
several times). ‘Out there, the condemned …’ You catch that word again:
‘condemned’; it is auspicious and the extended delivery emphasises this. The
textures are building over the basic pattern. Did she say ‘Inscape’? Hopkins in this sliding
world, the sounds busy but following the presence and absence of the voice with
their own. ‘Ghosts/hosts’, I hear, but the stuttered voice turns almost to pure
sound in its cutting off, and even sounds non-English at points. Or
glossalalic. Then silence. End of track.
Metablethers
A single electronic chime, a blast,
and then: there is Monk’s voice, loud, audible. Other instruments around,
Tippets again follows the flow of the speech, tracking the text’s vocal
realisation, with blips (as does the electronics). Monk swoops her words, she
is singing, really. ‘Yip,’ she says. Blip, she sings. She glissandos (that’s a
verb now). Tippetts sopranos (that’s verb too: everything is action). ‘Label.’
The roar rolls on: Monk’s rolling r’s across a stretch of r-words. Alliteration
recognised, although the meaning isn’t caught. Musique concrete blaps and sax squeaks, like 60s free jazz, but also
vaguely the contemporary avant-garde flutterings of a John Butcher. I hear what
feels like a list of words, a row of notes accompanying it, climbing, broadly
following the voice (again). Throat sounds: ‘oh!’ Phatic social noises are flung
around the sound-space. Gong-tones, guitar brush. ‘Arpeggio,’ Monk says. Wisely
the musicians (and Archer mixing them, remember: some of them are him multi-tracked)
don’t take this as an instruction, resist the worst form of musically mimesis, but
blip and blonk again instead (or in definance). ‘GRINGO?’ I’m hearing words,
for sure, but I am unsure they are really spoken. It’s no wonder. There is a
lot of interfering sound here. Lotman’s multi-systemic aesthetics seems too
neat to describe this. The back and forth of a machine, dirty electric acoustic
sounds are grinding against cleaner electronic sounds (it seems) in the same
way that Monk’s smoky-smoggy voice growls and grounds the purer flight of
Tippetts soaring voice, though she begins to emit long clear but quieter notes
as Monk’s speech lowers into less audible utterance. The zizzing electronics in
echoing reverb grate and blurt rather than chime, though chiming continues,
swamped by, and sinking into, the overall grainy texture. By the time there’s
no voice left, these noises are breakages, torn sounds across the nerves of
audition. They fade. End.
Commentary
This text is impressionistic as
yet, but there is an awareness of the multi-systemic theory in its
descriptions. I am surprised how little of the text I have apprehended, and
certainly in no way do I interpret it. I mis-hear it: ‘lush lush’ for ‘lash
lash’; ‘dark dark’ for ‘dart dart’, for example. The task of joining up the written
text to performance awaits its day. In the meantime I can take joy in having descended
very far down into the piece, so much so that the words were only as important
as the sounds. ‘Sonics v semantics’ does not so much happen here at this sonic
substratum. I listened intently to the music but didn’t hear (or misheard) the
words. The whole feeling, on the other hand, is dictated by the auspicious,
slow, caressing, but broken tone of Monk’s voice. It’s ghostly, ghastly, and
we’re aghast.
TITLES and Text
Titles are important lexical items
and formal pointers in most poems, but in the case of this recording they are
also the titles of tracks to be selected, and in one case, the title of the
entire musical composition. They might be the only words read by a listener. ‘Fluvium’
is not the Latin for river (as I thought). That is ‘fluvius’, though it is
derived from fluere, to flow, hence the English adjective ‘fluvial’, of or
belonging to rivers. ‘Flow’ is encoded in the etymology. ‘Fusile’ seems to be
clustered with similar words as ‘fusible’ or ‘fusil’, a noun meaning melting,
the state of fluidity (again) from heating. ‘Metablethers’ sounds strange although
we all know ‘Meta’ often implies change.
Somehow (how?) I thought ‘blether’ would be Scottish and it is, meaning
blather, to talk nonsense, but it implies fluent garrulity. So flow again.
Metablether implies transformation (to use a central word for my current
researches), transmogrification (to use a word in the text itself) or
transubstantiation (to use the word from Monk’s poetics).
‘Espial’, on the other hand, as
could be guessed, means ‘the act of espying, observation’, where ‘epsy’ means
to watch, from a distance, with connotations of discovering something
unexpectedly. ‘Ghast’ can be a verb, the Shakespearean ‘to strike aghast’ or to
affright, again the unexpected. Old English.
These words construct a kind of
lexical prospectus for this poem (and possibly for Archer’s music): everything
is in danger of transforming, at the levels of content and form. Material
‘blather’, the ordinary bits and pieces of our world are focussed upon
(‘espial’ might be right for this recognition of banal singularity with its
musical but redundant hyper-modification):
…. a very very very
curled up
beer mat.
Singular. Stiff.’ (Monk 2001: 87)
is ‘transmogrified’ in a
‘Night of urban freefall/ funlovers’. (87) The poem identifies flow as life.
Even under this city pleasure dome (one of the rare social glimpses of the
poem) ‘death and what not’, the ‘ghast’ details, are fended off with the
minatory ‘Take any shape but THAT’, with its excessively emphatic
typography (which perhaps Archer interprets as authority for sonic excess). Taking
shape again suggests transformation (perhaps shamanistic this time), and escape.
The world of ‘Abandoned moon buggies’ with which the poem opens (amid all that
whispering as though this a secret place, barely audible) is both recognisable,
the urban detritus of dumped motor vehicles, and alien; to annex a phrase from
the poetics, this is a ‘lunarscape’ as well, with cast-off space-junk scattered
across its surface. Archer re-orders the poems (or his realisations of them) so
that the work no longer ends at a state of rested totality amid the fragmented
urbanism of ‘fisile’,
come-come to me soothing/
sleep…
(wayafter
aching midnight), (Monk 2001: 91)
but with the more ghastly image
(and call to music, of course, authorising Archer’s elaborate coda described
aboove):
sing while
’er
blueberry hair
stalagmites
(Monk 2001: 90)
Only a witch or some ghastly
ghostly creature could possess hair made of blueberries. Its transformation into
spiky, prickly stalagmites (the word itself transformed from static noun to
active verb) is a necessarily slow one, and reminds us that transubstantiation
(whether of words or objects, whether in life or performance) happens at a
variety at speeds. Additionally, collaborative work such as the recording of Fluvium occurs simultaneously at various
synchronised and non-synchronised, but collectively signifying, multi-systemic
levels (to use Lotman very loosely again).
Aftershock
Perhaps the most extraordinary
proof of this mode of conceiving of work in performance as the interactions of
‘levels’ is Archer’s composition ‘Aftershock’ which completes the CD: it is a
re-mix of ‘Fluvium’, and perhaps of other materials not used, to create a dense
remoding of the earlier piece, both voices and musical sounds, though occasionally
leaving allusive space for recognition of its fragments. It consists of vocal
samples of speech, song and sprechgesang,
with minimal electronics. The words are sometimes recognisable (‘Is there
anybody there?’ most memorably) but the reprises are transformed, by a much
fiercer sampling, cutting, repetition (particularly the ‘Rappa rappa’ chorus) and with formidable overdubs to pulverise the
sounds to ‘micro-vocal particles’ (to use Henri Chopin’s words) and non-lexical
vocal sounds (but still preserving the timbre of Monk’s voice) while Tippetts’
multi-tracked voice skitters around them. This passage is close to the formal
electro-acoustic manipulation of Stockhausen’s ‘Gesang der Jünglinge’. It builds
to an echolalic chittering as aural texture. ‘Aftershock’ is a demonstration of
much of my thesis about form (in extended inter-media): it is a formal
recognition that any formed and formal artefact may be de-formed and re-formed,
that any form may be transformed – and that the modes of transformation –
re-writing, re-composing, translation, and finally reading, and listening
themselves, are stages in an infinitely expandable (though humanly constrained)
formal (and thereby human) adventure.
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
[i] Details of both CDs may be accessed here: Angel High Wires :http://www.discus-music.co.uk/dis14cd.htm;
and Fluvium: http://www.discus-music.co.uk/fluvium.mp3
(accessed 18th March 2014).
