Last week on the same day that was stuffed with songs and sung to the sky - the day that was Thursday - i made several recordings of several events while walking about and sitting about and thinking and reading. Some very beautiful things happened and i don't think i would have even heard or seen them had i not been looking through the hard gauze that protects the tiny probes of my zoom H2. I stopped and sat on a stool at Jungle Juice and just for fun turned on the microphone and listened to everything as it was happening. I've got that bad boy set at highest gain possible, so when i monitor what its scribbling on its SD everything comes through loud and clear and its like the whole street was running through my head, between the curves of the cortex and under the hypothalamus and outward into the cold wet sky again.
Here is the recording:
While you are listening, i thought it might be fun if you could read what i was reading at the time, which is pretty weird because it was a scene set in a cafe in Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers:Divine appeared in Paris to lead her public life about twenty years before her death. She was then thin and vivacious and will remain so until the end of her life, though growing angular. At about two a.m. she entered Graff's Cafe in Montmartre. The customers were a muddy, still shapeless clay. Divine was limpid water. In the big cafe with the closed windows and the curtains drawn on their hollow rods, overcrowded and foundering in smoke, she wafted the coolness of scandal, which is the coolness of a morning breeze, the astonishing sweetness of a breath of scandal on the stone of the temple, and just as the wind turns leaves, so she turned heads, heads which all at once became light (giddy heads), heads of bankers, shopkeepers, gigolos for ladies, waiters, managers, colonels, scarecrows.
She sat down alone at a table and asked for tea.
"Specially fine China tea my good man," she said to the waiter.
With a smile. For the customers she had an irritatingly jaunty smile. Hence, the "you-know-what" in the wagging of the heads. For the poet and the reader, her smile will be enigmatic...
... She drank her tea before thirty pairs of eyes which belied what the contemptuous, spiteful, sorrowful, wilting mouths were saying...
... The cafe disappeared, and Divine was metamorphosed into one of those monsters that are painted on walls - chimeras or griffins - for a customer, in spite of himself, murmured a magic word as he thought of her:
Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
And so that is that and now this is this. I think i will post more of these field recordings for the time being. When i listen to these files that i make available, it strikes me that the most compelling pieces are the ones made in the field. Stimulating, dangerous and deliciously uncontrollable - the environment seems to fold the many strings, depress the keys and gently hold the pipe upon her lips. When we play in these field jams we are only agents - the world takes control - we can only dance between the logs and life rafts of this accidental stream.
As for the studio sessions. There are some things that i like but there are more that i don't. It is all just experimentation and getting to know what we can do and what its gonna sound like. For the moment. But without the world to sing along we put ourselves up the front and then get to performing and it sort of seems to lose its thin seeds of honesty. And so that is the challenge i set for myself: to drop the bullshit and just let the vital force (elan vital) just happen. In the studio before the microphone. As it does when we sit back and listen, on bated breath, daring the world to make a sound.
But as a sort of special present i thought i might post for you to hear this lovely little recording of an improvised session i was fortunate enough to attend (and quietly bootleg) in Fort Cochin, Kerala, South India. Here we have two exceptional musicians playing sitar and tabla and i think you'll agree it is a very beautiful event. Later.
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