Sunday, August 31, 2008

101 hours of vocal-chord-produced stuff ...

John Cougar, memorably, wanted a hand to hold onto. I want all of my Sunday, from daybreak to darkest night, to be filled with the sounds of Surrealist radio. On this Sunday, I wake to news from Andrew Torch (the hardest-working man in St. Louis Surrealism) that what I want is mine.

KBOO Community Radio in Oregon, home to the homiest call letters in world radio, boo, is just now hosting 101 Hours of Innumerable Small Events Which May or May Not Be Related to One Another, an aural celebration of Dadism and Surrealism, and you had better believe I will be listening online all day, all night - or until my wife wakes up and makes me clean the gutters and "turn down that empty can radio."

It seems in the right spirit that I have signed on during a "To be announced" lull in what is otherwise a remarkably tighly scheduled program, considering that the event honors the erratic powers of the unconscious.

But I am looking forward to the next piece of mapped terrain, at 7 a.m. their time (9 a.m. my time in St. Louis):

7a—Automatic Writing by opera composer Robert Ashley is one of his early pieces where he stimulates his own mild form of Tourette's syndrome into performance art in a piece which sometimes got him into legal difficulty. This is a recording of a very mild attack from 1979 with electronics.

I found a review - a most unusual review - that put Automatic Writing in the context of a mixtape made for the purposes of ingesting LSD!

"A Missing Sense was originally conceived as a private tape to accompany my taking of LSD. When in that particular state, Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing was the only music I could actually experience without feeling claustrophobic and paranoid. We played it endlessly; it seemed to become part of the room, perfectly blending with the late night city ambience and the 'breathing' of the building." The piece features the voices of Ashley and Mimi Johnson, with electronics and Polymoog backing, with a switching circuit designed and built by Paul DeMarinis. A fascinating and mysterious work focused on 'involuntary speech'" (Forced Exposure).

I don't have any taste for LSD, but I do like the sound of late night city ambience and buildings that breathe ... And I wonder if this is Paul DeMarinis, the St. Louis jazz scene stalwart?

The DJ just broke in and promised, upcoming, some "vocal-chord-produced stuff, but it's not going to be spoken and word and it's not going to be really what you'd call singing ..."

Fun, fun!

*

Image is an "anonymous piece" of art that one day arrived at KBOO, from the station Flickr site.

3 comments:

A.A. said...

The current block of music (Robert Ashley)is what I used to call 'music to MELT-TO'. 2pm our time (Central) is the music of Marcel Duchamp by chance opertaions (?) and 4pm: plays by Louis Aragon.
-Torch

A.A. said...

typo = 'operations'

Poetry Scores said...

The Robert Ashley piece immediately enters my top whatever list of essential pieces of whatever. I will own "Automatic Writing" as soon as I can get it.