ПЕРГАМЕН ПАМ`ЯТІ ...

ПЕРГАМЕН ПАМ`ЯТІ
Вадим Лесич

Пергами пам`яті пом`ятий, не шелестить,
як шумлять затьмарені сади вечора
і вітер гне, наче лук, дугу далечі
і луки ликують під фіялками сутінку.
Бурий дим - і округла, мов гльоб, порожнеча.
Дим від кострубатих кістяків життя,
що попеліють.
Порожнеча, яка чекає на повноту.

Пергамен пам`яті іржаво
запалює свічі на вівтарі вечора.
Мов мох полярний - синіють приморозки.
Під білими зорями тремтить,
мов павутиння, музика Гріга.
Речі зовсім не пов`язані, що існують
окремо кожне для себе, -
але, наче доспілі овочі з різних дерев,
- падають важко у тиші саду
на землю, що меркне в чеканні.

Тіні стають, мов дерева,
і дерева стають, мов тіні.
Пергамен пам`яті
зашелестів
піском розбитих дзеркал
у розсипаній пустині.


THE PARCHMENT OF MEMORY
Vadym Lesych

The parchment of memory changing, not rustling,
like sound darkening gardens yesterday
and wind bends, as if a bow, the arch of distance
and meadows rejoice below the violets of twilight.
Chestnut smoke - and around me, like a globe, emptiness.
Smoke from the rough skeleton of life,
that turn to ashes.
Emptiness, which waits for fullness.

The parchment of memory rustily
lights candles on the altar of evening.
As polar moss - bluing frosts.
Under white stars trembles,
as if a cob webs, the music of Grieg.
Things totally unbound, that exist
each for itself,-
but, as ripened fruit from different trees,
- falling heavily in the silence of the orchard
to earth, which fades in waiting.

Shadows become as trees,
and tress become as shadows.
The parchment of memory
rustles,
the sand of shattered mirrors
in the spilled desert.

translated by Curtis Jensen

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 12, 13, 14

DAY 12, 13, 14


Home now. Or, at least, in Utah. Not really sure how long that drive was. Left at 2 or 3 in the morning from Newport, Kentucky on Sunday, finally lurched up to the curb in front of Tyler's house around 1 in the afternoon on Tuesday. Punch drunk, essentially- the van has shaken us all to bits. Slept for 18 hours, now awake, but ears are ringing and am not thinking very straightly.

The last show was very big, I did not see final attendance numbers, but it either was the largest or just about the largest show of the trip. In a mansion. The haunted birthplace of John Taliaferro Thompson, inventor of the Thompson Sub-Machine gun. The mansion is across the river from Cincinnati, but I didn't see any ghosts.


*****


What the fuck was that?

The engine of the van is surging violently, a fan belt accompanying with unearthly shrieks. Something smells scorched. The traffic in the canyon is funneled down to one lane in each direction. 71 miles to go.

Well boys, I think we've just lost 3rd gear...


*****


It's just a hell of a thing, that there's just two of you up there!

Yeah man, that's just how we do it!

All that sound from just the two of you!

Yeah man!

I'll tell you what I am going to do-

What's that?

I'm going to buy me another of them shirts.

You bet, a wise choice there.

I've already bought the one with the tentacles, and now I'm going to by the one in the yellow.

Sounds good man.

It's just a hell of a thing, there there's just the two of you up there!

Yeah man, that's how we do it.


*****

I haven't watched Sunn O))) really until tonight. How could I? Most nights there is so much fog that one can hardly see them on stage, let alone 20 feet in front of your face. That and I am usually hobbled to the merch table, which oftentimes is not in line of sight of the performance.

But tonight I have watched them. From the balcony. From the furthest right wing of the balcony, practically directly over the stage. 2 Ohioan metal-ers are in front of me, and as I come up to the edge of the balcony they quickly settle back into their seats as if they had been engaged in some degree of pre-sex act before I stumble up out of the synthetic smoke to their perch. I think that this was so because on my way around the balcony, I encounter two other couples in similarly murky corners of the night clenched in passionate acts. I suppose gratuitous amounts of fake fog lends an event to gratuitous displays of public affection?

I had no idea that Sunn O))) played like this. Greg Anderson and Steve Moore are constantly communicating, through body language as well as through the improvisational device of call and response. Moore is the slap-back of Anderson's slow chords, Rhodes the decay / bloom of Model T, vacuum tube, wave form, Gold Top.

Attila's boots must be bolted down, he hardly moves his lower body. The same cannot be said for his upper body, his hands gesture and sing back and up, down and in, out and forth all the time, his fingers pastiching a product of multiple symbols: the upraised hand of the Ringatu, the closed index finger and thumb of the Vitarka Mudra, the assumed Heart in Hand, the Trinitarian Formula and the 5 Wounds of Christ. The microphone becomes a Vajra, a lightning bolt brushed across his lips as he takes up the third voice in the counter melody of Moore and Anderson. A perverse farrago, or a medley-Varamudra: Attila dispersing boons to the audience? My impulse is towards the later, although admittedly I have ordered breakfasts with this guy- barring such personal history I could imagine the effects of his stage persona to be taken much, much differently. Notably, Attila employs his left hand decidedly more than his right.

Gentry has described Sunn O))) as a music of gestures. From the heights of the Southgate House's balcony, Gentry's description seems very accurate.


*****


You have fucking got to be kidding me. Is this fucker really going to pull me over?

I have just wormed up into the loft. I am very, very tired, and knowing that it'll be my turn to drive at 5 or 6 (it is 2:30 or so now) as soon as the van is moving I head for the loft. Shortly after that the cop pulls us over. Tyler is driving.

License and registration.

What seems to be the problem, officer?

What kind of a setup do you have in there?

There's a loft back there, one of our guys is in there.

The cop shines his light over Tyler's shoulder and into the back of the van. I am tired enough that I don't even look up at the light.

You do know that in the state of Kentucky all passengers in a vehicle must be wearing a safety belt.

Is that so? She passed in Utah, where we're from.

Yes, but you are in Kentucky now.

Well we are headed back to Utah tonight, and we didn't know about that.

All the same, you are in the state of Kentucky now.

The cop takes the paper work. Utah has a the same seat belt laws. Gentry and Tyler talk back and forth loudly and nervously. I pull myself out of the loft and onto the mattress spread out on the speaker cabinets behind the front seats of the van. The cop returns.

Here are these. You know that the safety belt law was enacted to protect you in the case of an accident.

We're just trying to get back to Salt Lake-

But not wearing safety belt, if you guys get in an accident, that guy back there, he's dead.

I'm sorry sir...

The cop doesn't issue Tyler a ticket. He also doesn't make me feel any better about sleeping in the loft tonight.

It is a good thing I wasn't driving, I am always mean to cops- says Gentry.

It is a good thing he didn't fucking breathalyze me!- says Tyler.


*****


This is my fucking baby! Here look I shit it out for you and it has arms and eyes and a rape face!

Gentry is in the back, kneeling, with his knees pointing out, and holding a water bottle full of chew-spit and piss between his legs.

I'm going to fucking Wendy's!- says Tyler.

Me too!- I say as I drift the van into the right hand lane of the street that bisects Kearney, Nebraska. I've been here before, not just once, but a few times. Here I am again.


*****


It is really very cold in the van. In the night I've unpacked my sleeping bag and spread it over myself, which was difficult to do in the loft as you are so close to the ceiling. I can hardly stand to sleep in the loft when we are driving because you are triply subjected to the lurches and jolts of the 30-year old machine. I have hardly slept as I have developed a mind-grinding habit of waking every thirty or forty minutes to check to see if we have yet rolled off into the ditch. I imagine that if we had rolled off into the ditch I would know without checking every thirty or forty minutes.

I pull myself out of the loft, crawl past Gentry asleep on the speaker cabinets, and I fold myself into the driver's seat. It is early, before sunrise. The sagebrush plains of the high, red desert are radiant and rich in the pre-dawn golden hour. I rub my eyes with the palm-heel of my hands, then turn the ignition.


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EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 11

DAY 11


2nd to last show, in Michigan. An email that I've just sent reads something like this:

There is so much fog from the three fog machines which Sunn O))) deploys every night that I can't see the keyboard of this laptop. they are playing right now, it is so loud that the screen seems blurry with certain notes. I miss you. I am very very tired, we slept in the van last night in a truck stop in Gary, Indiana. I woke up at 8 and began driving. The van is not running so well, the transmission has been slipping and there is a knock coming from the rear right hub...

Feel as though I am at last getting the hang of this tour, the routines and the difficult to navigate fields of interpersonal relationships. Really though, the tour as a whole is going very very smoothly, all of us loading and unloading together without more than the usual complaint, and generally everyone is getting along very well. It has been a very peculiar adjustment, this tour, from my previous experiences: I am at the bottom of the totem pole, the merch-slinger. Although it is a relief to have nothing at stake in most aspects of this trip, often times I feel as though that I should.

I have felt strangely the whole trip. It is the first tour on which I've ever been where I don't feel like I am away from home. I feel I am simply just away. From what I don't know.



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EAGLE TWIN NOTES DAY 10

DAY 10






SHOW REVIEW: DE KALB, IL

What is the link between the improvisational capability of Eagle Twin and the long phrase of Sunn O)))'s Slow Music?

Action. Improvisation is a rational and gestural act, differential in nature, rolling forward from point to point to point never freezing, eye to eye with it's inevitable end, resigned to this end's possibility, but at the same time receptive for opportunities to build and sustain its passage in time. The improviser must communicate, must subjugate the ego in order to allow for the dual nature of the improvisational act- too much self, and the improvisation collapses into masturbatory wang-noodlry. But also the improviser must assert her or his self, must seize the momentary points in the music's current, and again the dual nature of improvisation manifests itself in this aspect of the act: the improviser must at once listen and react, flickering between the two, transient and finite in time at once. Improvisation is not consumption, it does not destroy the line of music in the current of time. And so is determined the long phrase of Sunn O))). Sunn O)))'s human-plectrums are the improvisers, finite in articulation, but transient in their wash of wave forms.

In both cases, the long phrase of Sunn O))) and the improvisation of Eagle Twin, the multiple contingencies of language slough away, so deterring the naturalization process of the unhealthy signs that infest our daily symbolic geography. Improvisation and the long phrase of slow music exist in the indicative mode, at unity gain of meaning. In nature, improvisation and the long phrase share the characteristic of a rational and gestural dialog, a dialog which roots both in the indicative, factual mode, and in so doing fortifies each against the crippling myth-making/marketing processes that terribly shimmer out in all directions of our daily lives. This is not to say that the performances of Sunn O))) and Eagle Twin cannot be recorded, reproduced, and distributed, exactly that has happened, and with the fierce-some marketing force of Southern Lord Records brought full to bear in both ensembles' histories. But live, on a stage in a town in Illinois, plaster and paint flaking off the walls, under an electric storm in full panorama, in every direction flashes and ground strikes, a fire fly tracing loops over the back of your hand, they are unrobbable by the naturalizing, parasitic processes of 2nd significations.



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EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 9

How many Ampeg 8x10 cabinets are weighing down vans or trailers attached to vans, all hurtling down the monumentally overbuilt motorways of our obese and over-entitled nation right this second? Too fucking many. How many shows feature acts that play essentially the same equipment but for relatively slight cosmetic differences? hey can you hurry up getting you Marshall 4x12 slant front speaker cabinet and Gibson SG and Marshall 50 watt head off of the stage so that I can place my Marshall 4x12 straight front speaker cabinet and Marshall JMP head and my Gibson Les Paul on the stage, without all of which I'd never be able to dial in the absolutely critical sonic signature of my tonal avatar?) Obviously considerations for the material differences of instruments must be allowed, however decisions as to practical necessity must be made with a more stern scimitar than that which is now being swung.

And the costs incurred by these and the 538 other bottomless habits of operation sewn into the touring culture of North American Independent Music are foisted upon consumers. Higher ticket costs, higher costs for touring culture's artifacts (which exist as the naturalization of the 'memory myth' of western event-consumption culture, which is a whole other big fucking mess), higher costs for the Coors Light that you just dropped $5 for at the bar (read as time spent laboring, say if you make $12 / hour answering customer service calls from some God-absent corner of some terrifying nest of cubicles at Discover Card's corporate head quarters, then that'd be 25 minutes of your life leashed to a phone bank in one of the most contemptible ditches of such a cruel glass and aluminum hell). Unethical, self-defeating, and at times practically malicious cost dumpings along the entire reach of the ethical spectrum are systemic in the touring process. Growth-focused commerce has no claim to any actual piece of standing ground in the metaphysical stuff of Live Music- about which is North American Touring Culture.

Multiple ideology-reinforcing myths exist within North American Independent Music's touring methodology, a methodology which actualizes a modus operandi determined by misuse of resources, a methodology the successes of which are determined by the displacement of operational expenses upon the consumer, and which assumes an unfounded right to geographic access. Dozens, if not dozens of dozens of further critiques could be set out against this methodology, but I am tired from a day off of lounging by the pool, watching cable television, enjoying the air conditioning of the 5th floor of the hotel in which I will upon a double bed sleep tonight having nuzzled up to a massive plate of Mexican food surrounded by middle-class people nuzzled up to other plates of Mexican food but the line of differentiation is that I paid for my meal with money set aside in the catering budget of the show that Eagle Twin (not I) played last night for which St. Louisians of many stripes paid $15.00 to see.

Most of the anecdotal references made here withstand major distortion in their transposition to the other market segments of Western Music such as hip hop, country, pop (all of which tend towards even greater maluse and profligacy.

The Western Myth of the Individual's Right to Travel Cheaply and at High Rates of Speed is one of our culture's most insidiously absurd significations. As travel industry handouts are retracted by the current trans-Atlantic politics of budget balancing, the Western Myth of the Individual's Right to Travel Cheaply and at High Rates of Speed is a skirmish line shaping up to become a surreal manifestation of class divisions that will will leave the middle class holding their plastic luggages, but without tickets or car keys or mortgages in hand.

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 8

DAY 8


Gentry tells a tour story that goes something like this:

We're driving and it is somewhere in Georgia on the way to Florida or something and we are in a rental van because we're on like the 3rd van that we've ruined on the tour so it is me and Cache is driving and there is Doug and Chad and I am in the back and the cabinets and the gear are just in the van in the back there are no seats- we are just on the floor of the van and Chad is behind me and there's a bass and some heads and we are going along like at 80 or 90 miles an hour and Cache is driving and then there is kgggaawhap and then the crazy part is then we fish tail back and forth a couple of times and we are just then he hits something and we are off to the side of the road and then I am just in the air but I look behind me over my shoulder and there is all the gear in the air and there is this bass head in the air coming towards me floating and coming towards me and I sort of while I am in the air move it aside and away from my head and then next I know I'm upside down on top of Doug and Chad is in the air his seat just hanging there clipped in and I am up on my shoulders and Cash turns around and just says he says How's my bitches?!


*****


Kgggaawhapfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrump - What the fuck was - frumpfrumpfrumpfrumpfrump - that? - frumpkrangfrumpgunkfrumkkrangngngngngngngngnfrumpfrump - I don't know - frumpfrumpfrumpthwackgngngngngfrumpfrumpfrump - a chunk of tire just shot out from - frimpfrimpfrimprrrrrrrrgrrrgrrrngngngngnnnnnnnngfrumpfromp - under the back - frompfrompfrompfrompppmmffffrrroommmppppppffrooommmpppfffroommmpp -What the fuck - fffrroooommpppffffrrooommppppppffrrrooommppppffffrooommmmppppppnnkkknnnnppppphphhhththth.

The van is off on the side of the interstate and it is hot and very muggy and all of the cars are whipping past.

Man you want to not drive?

Yeah man, that sounds good- I say.


******


ggggrrrunnkkkkkkddd

Tyler!

Fuck the fucking jack just broke!

I am around the front of the van and I come around to the driver's side and there is Tyler out to the side of the rusty old van on his knees in the parking lot pushing as hard as he can on the tire which is at a weird angle and then I can see that there is one lugnut on but the jack is crumpled underneath...


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EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 7

DAY 7


Attila is from Hungary.

'Man, what are you going to have for breakfast?'

'Pancakes, I'm going to have some mother fucking pancakes.'

'Banana nut.'

Attila is looking out the window.

At the hotel yesterday morning everyone is inside getting coffee, but Attila is standing on the edge of the parkway in the center of the hotel's half-circle driveway. He is smoking and his spine is curved as would be a knife fighter's tossed from the window of a 3rd story dance hall to the muddy banks of the trash creek below. His rolled cigarette is between the tips of his first and second fingers and his thumbs, and he's looking up towards the tops of the buildings across the street with a half grimace.

'... So basically you are paying a buck fifty for the hash browns.'

'Man, I don't know.'

A tour has a funny way of colluding the inconspicuous and mundane elements of the daily routines of its participants in very pleasant and surreal ways. Same goes for this trip, here we are, the vanguard of Slow Music, the present's manifestation of New Music, card carrying members of one of Metal's most revered and radical party's, around a 3 tables pushed together by a very large woman with a leech-shaped hickey on her thick neck in a Village Inn on a Tuesday morning in Omaha, oversized plastic menus glaring up at our drooping faces the photos of Skillets designed by the Skillet Experts.

Attila is at the head of the table: 'Cool- I am Grandfather!' He nudges me with his elbow, and pegs a finger at one of the laminated omelette photos, 'You see the heart? That is for me.'

3 or 4 or 2 years ago began a striking and continuing trend in Western Independent Music: the exploitation (to great and to poor effects dually) of organ-timbres- Arcade Fire, Beirut, Ratatat a frozen fencepost full of others to which I am not hip. Parallely, dense, polyphonic voicings surfaced (and then engulfed in a synthesized firestorm keyboard hooks) the Industrial Pop Music Complex.

Overtone singing, also known as throat singing, overtone chanting, or harmonic singing, is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the resonances (or formats) created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocal folds, and out the lips to produce a melody.

Throat singing is both a generic and a specific term. Generally, the term is applied to any singing style which entails the application of a harsh voice or some other constriction. Specifically, the term refers to a type of Central Asian and Siberian overtone singing

­So sayeth the interweb.

Attila, at the crowd-point of the Sunn O))) parallelogram, at the dark yawn of his cloak hood a bullet-form raven's mic in both hands, by means of overtone singing and the harsh voice, delivers the most rich, most full polyphonic organ-timbre in the business, hands fucking down. He actualizes his two, three, and at times four dimensional tree-groan with the exact pathos required of Sunn O)))'s nightly Great Musical Leap. His stage presence and execution call into question the capability of any other member of the human race to do any of this any better than himself.

'I will have this Award Winner.'

'Award winner?'

'Yes, this Award Winner.'

'The pie?'

'Yes, the pie.'

'You want that warm or with ice cream, hon?'

Attila pauses, looking at the menu. Then he looks up to her where she leers large and puffed over his shoulder, 'Warm.'