Mardin. While a small ensemble plays music at the side of a busy street in this southeast Anatolian city, a boy dances along, feeling his way through the persistent rhythm.  Meanwhile, the street keeps on being just a street, with people carrying on doing their people things.

In which we weave together contrasting voices, human or otherwise,

drawn from obscure sources, into a magic carpet that plies the waves

of the digital ætherium just as did Odysseus the seas of old.

A contribution to the Soundy Visitations compilation,

edited by Daniel Blumin

for the 2023 WFMU Fundraising Marathon.

A dry description of the locale will not satisfy the

task of describing the place; especially when the experience

of it interleaves objective perception, memory, dilated time,

and all the other observations that come from being in an

unfamiliar place over a period of days. And so we are left

with this set of allusions.

Thanks to:

Sonic Futures Residencies

and Semi Silent.

Special thanks to Anamaria Pravicencu, and all of my fellow resident sound artists.

Installation for four-channel sound and motion picture

In English, we use the phrase “to drop off” to refer to the process

of falling asleep. Drop off of what? It is not specified. But

these words remind us of an abyss, an unknowable depth, the

danger of leaving behind the world forever. Here, we posit the

analogy of our experience during

hypnagogia

as akin to a cinema, where random synaptic discharges in the brain during the process

of falling asleep draw strange pictures before the mind’s eye.

The work Hypnagogické cykly was installed at

OGV, the Regional Gallery of Vysočina

in Jihlava, Czechia, from 10 June to 28 August, 2022.

The feast of k’virik’oba (კვირიკობა), in honor of St. Kvirike of the Georgian church, is held every year atop the mountain in Upper Svaneti where the church of Sts. Kvirike and Ivlita sits. Hundreds of people from all over Georgia come to visit the church, recieve a blessing, and feast. St. Kvirike is associated with hilltops and the pagan god of thunder.

A place named nowhere, now here — the empty set — a cæsura, break, split or gap — a nonce — an elision — a minimus — a leaving-out — a vacuum abhored by nature, and much ado about it — oblivion — Null Island — Rub‘ al Khali — limbo — mu — ex nihilo — absolute zero .

The train pulls into the crumbling station, an ornate pile of blackened bricks, steel girders framing dust-fogged windows, statuary caked with grime. Erstwhile passengers run from the gathering clouds and cold gusts as the light swiftly evaporates. The ode of the clocktowers begins.

The fake thing is the impetus; the real thing is the echo (of it).

In the crepuscular haze of a decaying, but busy, transfer passageway between old urban train stations, we study the gaits, the postures, the faces, the precise trajectories taken, of those who are simply moving between their own personal points A and points B.

It is often hard to know when we are approaching a limit. The contours of our zone of awareness unexpectedly reveal the crumbling ledge when we least expect it. From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached (Kafka).