Test 1/ Salvaged

we kissed delicious on a brown iron rust boat

we kissed delicious on a brown iron rust boat

test two- test two- test two

Poor Rabbit Alice, I crackle in the cold

test one: Poor Rabbit Alice, I'm uncertain in the cold

[dubbed on 1/2 inch tape from original acetate before the fire, started by an arsonist in Chicago, a black separatist.]

test a- reprise: We kissed- delicious- on an iron rust-brown boat.

test d- lovers fleeing the capital under the archived sky/ the similarity of love and drowning.

'I took photographs in college but nothing particularly serious: old trees, dead machines, party wreckage, stray women, lakes where children had drowned and river banks where their raincoats were retrieved.'

intercepted phone call: 'I tell you, you leave pills on the table, they'll get snatched; you leave any substance anywhere and it will go. Weigh it, it'll come up light and then what? Forget it.

test two (attempt six): Can we finish this before we lose the light, please

test 9 (chem. 5) A skinny girl playing the fiddle in a 1956 Hungarian production of Romeo and Juliet. Photograph shows performance's conclusion in Juliet's mausoleum. Exegesis: Tableau alludes to the contemporary situation in Hungary, i.e. a state of not-death/ not-life, a stagnation and still-birth resolved in slaughter. Exegetical failure: Tableau identical to ending of production staged in the 1820s to mollify the King, a die-hard fan of tragedy. Consequent exegesis: Tableau suggests corrected history of Stalinist purges and echoes the alterations of art brought on Stalinist interference.

test 12/ test 12/ test 12: first pressing

I was used.

I was used

I was used to this happening

the familiar tickle and the weird ache

my stomach swirling with the gloomy green sea

fattening and thinning. We kissed, delicious, delicious,

on a brown iron rust boat.

O-, a most stunning oratorio, Kleinman; quite the most magickal Event of this- or Any other- Season.

1. Blur- You're So Great

2. Serge and Charlotte Gainsbourg- Lemon Incest (file removed)

3. Cocteau Twins- A Kissed Out Red Floatboat

Arthur Rackham's Alice. No copyright infringement intended.

Discourse On Modern Living

1. Fire is not a friend

2. Nightly dose of nitrous oxide, nicely, icily, into my lungs

3. Virginity is lost in a park

4. Nervous in churches

5. Things always already over or ending.

6. Supermarkets are comforting

7. Smog is the new rain

8. The absolute minimum all the time

9. There are too many questions, there are too many sirens, there are too many illnesses

10. I discover, I devour, I desire, I discover, I devour, I desire

11. 'Is it real or is it Memorex?'

12. Matthew Broderick in War Games is the ideal man

13. You kiss like a washing machine

14. The culture of smoke, the culture of water, the culture of mud

15. 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism'

16. There are too many quotations, there are too many sciences, there are too many revisions

17. Discontent, dissent, descent

18. Disc content, assent, ascent

19. Cravings

20. Fridge noises

1. Donna Summer- State of Independence

2. Four Tet- Angel Echoes

3. Cluster- Fur Luise

Witches

I asked him, Please remove your straw from my milkshake, your strawberry froth will ruin my fur coat.

He asked if I had carried on acting and playing the violin since we last spoke.

I told him No, no way. Not since I auditioned for Tamora.

Theatre was boring anyway, ever since all those overcast afternoons in primary school, putting together thorny crowns for the prop department. It wasn't a department at all. It was that woman with the terrible neuralgia whose son died in the faraway country. Is she dead now? No one told me what neuralgia was. Someone said it was like the cow illness only longer. I found the condition in a red library encyclopaedia and there was a picture of a neuralgic patient: he had lightning striking his face and he was screaming and he was screaming until the encyclopaedia thudded shut.

A splotch of milkshake kisses fake fur.

Violin? He prompted, rustling through some broken biscuits.

Calluses, I said. Each finger like a winter branch.

I asked about all the afternoons we had spent holding hands by the river, all that tar and fire and sickly sun and nights with sore skin on our lips. He said we wasted them. I didn't say Yes, we did. He was always scared of the river anyway. He was frightened of falling. When we went to the river it never looked particularly strong. The last thing to drown in that river was a witch.

Whatever happened to witches? They probably still exist but we are looking in the wrong places. Where would witches live today?

There, he drew.

Slow afternoon light.

Christian Marclay in 'Ghost (I Don't Live Today)'. No copyright infringement intended.

Fosterchildren

A sad midwinter afternoon... frost scrawled all over the windows as we do a dance to a sonata as delicate as children's hands, the gradual oranging of the afternoon, and the slow construction of a sickly moon (that wasn't meant to rhyme).

Once, when we were kittens, me and Hazel were told to paint. The teacher is a ghost now, but she said to paint 'home' What does home look like, she said.

(This is the only way I can write.) What colour is home? And we both drew anonymous buildings like factories, like churches, like prisons, like offices in thick smoggy grey and licked our fingers because that made the clouds more life-like.

Our bodies later found in empty baths. Sophie playing piano in a half-empty room for an asleep audience. Out in the woods in a world full of rain... dense greenery spangling over my eyes like (I don't know how to finish this bit) dense greenery scattered over my eyes exploding here like a dirty heap of stars. When I was younger I thought it was pronounced frosterchild and now I find this very difficult to say. All the other children, like cats, prowling.

My mattress, muddy, on the kerb.

Two accidental orphans and a sonata like water down the plug hole.

(I cut this out, I black this out, I forget this)

1. John Cage- Music for Marcel Duchamp

2. Nico- Ari's Song

3. Hood- In Iron Light

Photograph of Kim Gordon onstange in Holland in 1991. No copyright infringement intended.

The Art/ Act Of Political Listening

'Musical distribution techniques are today contributing to the establishment of a system of eavesdropping and social surveillance [...] The monologue of standardised, stereotyped music accompanies and hems in a daily life in which in reality no one has the right to speak anymore.'

Jacques Attali- Noise: The Political Economy of Music

Music and politics mix on an illicit frequency. Listener C is a crafty, educated political listener. What concerns her, unlike her disconnected friends A and B, is each track's background noise, its sonic subtext that echoes other systems, structures, functions and types of wiring.

Our musical systems and structures aren't Cagey, formalist or theoretical but they do predetermine certain things. First we remember the capitalist system (and of course, its encoded structure), which creates a strict hierarchy of commodities, exposure and style. It's a monetary system. Every time C, the political listener, hears anything, she's aware of this system, how it determines the shape of the band, the recording studio and the end product.

Each band is structured around an outdated model where the Voice is allowed tremendous power and the remaining sounds are nearly muted. The producer who foregrounds the Voice writes a sonic synecdoche of government, allowing a single person prominence over all others, at their expense, while they silently work within like civil servants. There are echoes of political structure again as patterns of behaviour are enforced. Research indicates particular qualities within the Voice that need to be tapped, amplified and looped. Certain behaviour must be avoided, a selling point (a capitalist necessity) must be located for successful continuation of the product and it must be endorsed by past candidates to achieve the correct level of exposure. The contours of capitalism can grafted onto the artistic process without a slight hiccough.

It's alright cos the historical pattern has shown

How the economical cycle tends to revolve [...]

Bigger slump and bigger wars and a smaller recovery.

Stereolab, Ping Pong

The product's function isn't clear. C knows the intention is to plug a void, to provide a Voice for the Voiceless, but usually there are the sensations of multi-tracking, of sampling, looping, performing cover versions. C knows these Voices are familiar, have been heard before, and are only slightly different from their ancestors... perhaps the pitch's shifted a little but who can say? Wiring is the shadowiest element of all. The wires in machines are invisible: they run power back and forth, they maintain power and they lurk behind, within, the other systems and structures. C knows that corporations own the wiring, they control how the machine operates: all wiring leads to a singular power source. But political listening doesn't create transparency. We know that awareness of the machine's deficiencies (solidity in an age of steam) doesn't speed its collapse.

Political listening is a kind of violence. The political listener, our beautiful C, isn't a participant in mass culture and its fake images of togetherness. She knows listening is political, ethical, an act of disquiet. It means attack, escape and rejection. The substance of political music isn't always superficial. The audio-incendiary noise of Rage Against The Machine is, yeah, political but it doesn't represent a disengagement from conventional politics or any alternatives other than the stratified, straitjacketing microcosm of 'alternative' invented by the market place. The political act lies with the listener. It's the heavy-puffing Christian Slater of Pump Up The Volume, secretly transmitting in his bedroom, who can fuck things up, mangle the system and start fires in the miserable Reagan '80s. And perhaps Eisenstein's collaboration with Prokofiev, with its scarcely-hidden attack on Stalin's terror, via his love of musicals, is a great political act, one where all the wiring is viciously made visible.

The political listener takes the noise, the reverberations, the desolation of contemporary sound and reforms them as a violent act or thought. Once the standards and stereotypes are rejected by the individual then she can speak for herself and her listening become political.

1. Stereolab- Ping Pong

2. Robert Wyatt- At Last I Am Free

3. My Bloody Valentine- Sueisfine

Untitled piece by Hermann Nitsch. No copyright infringement intended.

Only The Good Die Young

His aging face hardened and weathered by the unflinching Missouri sun. His old bones wrapped round his 1869 Schofield. A wheezy breath filling his lungs. Coughing on exhale. Eyes brimming with hate and remorse. Weary and tired Jesse Woodson James rots into the dust on which his house is built on.



Rage Against the Machine - Renegades Of Funk

Photo of Vietnamese Buddhist Monk setting himself alight in protest. Photographer unknown. No Copyright infringement intented.

Come And Shake Bones

She looked like a piece of meat. Not in the sexist sense, at least that would could have been taken as a compliment in a twisted misogynistic way. She however looked like a piece of pork, greased up and freshly tied with string ready for the oven. Her uncompromising thighs, bloated under the pressure of a 16 year old burden. He face reddened by a thousand blocked veins. Her sagging breast lay strewn across her chest unsupported like Dali's eggs dripping down her front. I danced with her for a short time, she tried to keep up but the beat to the commercial sound that suffocated the airways was too fast, staccato . Excited by the faintest of sexually charged attention, determined not to put a trotter wrong this time. Her slightly rosy quality was a endearing for a short time, but i soon grew weary of her. Pushed to the back of the room, she now sat alone and there she'll stay, and breathing cliche of repulsion. Sitting alone at the back, an endless monument to the forgotten masses. She soon turned to stone, granite I think it was.

Photograph by Paul Strand Entitled Blind. no copyright infringement intended.

Playboy Tre - Sideways (SALEM Drag Chop remix)
Big Boi - Shine Blockas (feat. Gucci Mane)
Gucci Mane - Dangers Not a Stranger