All the Sounds that Were Ever Excluded – A Selection from Eastman

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[Stay On It]

 

The wear of the voice reaching

After heaven

Mackey called it

Falsetto of this bright bird song

From bells we make a beyond

We make the sky glow

With patterns of all we are

These rooftops release

The view from its pollution

The city from its expropriation

Give the bodies back

This is the view

From an impossible

Disco in the air

The sustained notes of erstwhile

Morning

Mourning no more

The repetition in domination

So we are the insistent redress

Of dance and the notes

Are in a dance

And the

Words are in a dance

And

So we are

So we whistled

So we whistled our way

Into paradise

Check your body

At the door

Angel of control

No more

Angel of death

No more

So what we whistled was what

We were

Was birdsong prefigured by morning

Or morning by birdsong?

When you sang I couldn’t tell

I couldn’t tell the voice from your instrument

Your instrument from your personhood

Seizing its sudden freedom

Immediately among the eyebeams

And otherworldly force of others

Erupting in this world

Immanent to xylophone

To that other whistling within

The seepage of balloons

When the afterparty’s over

That’s where I want to be

With a hangover in the bright sun with you

Somber as hell but loving you

Hungry and tired and cold

Thinking how are we going to get home

 

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[440]

 

New fashioned ears beyond countable

Wavelengths sound like sirens across the bay

Sound like nothing except themselves

Some music of the spheres not being rational

Because they hum for a real long time

 

Like this was 2001

Not like Hal but like a search engine in 2001

Or maybe the howl played backward like one were trying to mime hell

Or a Buchla broke down and abandoned in the studio

Just left there to chirp for all eternity, to bleep

 

Plucking is the only respite from prepared bark

Prepared howl, prepared cacophony

“Overtone” rhymes with “overthrown” obviously

 

There is fucking with the octave and fucking with the recording of the overtone

 

There is fucking with the overtone’s untranscribeability necessitating a score

 

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[Macle]

 

Remain in the hole, the macula

There is no way to put a scream into a song, or is there?

There is no way to put a scream into a poem

 

Make this the agora or commons of all the sounds that were ever excluded

Which would have to include your best animal imitations

Best bark, best snort, best chirp, best squawk, best cat in heat

 

Which would also include best cackle, best doowop, best orgasm, best spiritual, best field holler, best effects pedal

 

Car key jingle, water glass tinkle, saw wave, sine wave, lament, canticle, radio…

Call these “actions”

 

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[Eight Songs for a Mad King]

 

dada my key my

dear strange dancing fling

 

meh meh let me

try and some you

 

*

 

dear lack tell and

oh be strangling greying

 

snakes I be hung

gone and low yellow

 

*

 

green like a tape

and bones I think

 

it is thought Adam

I being you

 

*

 

what it was that

you sing

on my

knee glory dam

 

Adam sweet

Thames fa ah

fa heed

God God

 

*

 

by my people

gather me from

my people

 

they are within

we are modern

unto what garden

a new sound

 

*

 

sweet Thames

no more soft

 

I am weary

of this faint

 

I am the ah

when is the

queen

 

*

 

have they chained

you my darling in

a stage war

 

do they stab you

strike you

astound

you and your

whole world?

 

*

 

on my

ride like

a starlet’s

mouth

 

*

 

I hate white lies

let it be a black lie

 

a landlord sin sin

lack eyes

 

*

 

my writs

are coughs

ever I

your kind

have cut

 

*

 

on my breast a star

 

the king is dead

he will die

 

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[If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?]

 

Ascending in so much silence

This hiss of taps

Or sound sucked out

Doubling your debt

Crying while whistling

Then everything deflates

The notes of a soggy day

Defeated by bell

By distant brass

Blamed in this present

Descending the comedy of everyday

Noise a commons

I can imagine everything that can go wrong

A dialogue of depressives

Swatting at flies

Having farted

What a relief

Then the doorbell rings

Broken doorbell of our dreams

It all rises

The world rises

To fall like stocks

Like stockings

Like pants

Without suspenders

In this sad dumb joke

Charlie Brown phone voice

Tirade symphony

Insistently

Sneaking in a phasing violin

Ding-donging

Hearing little else but obstruction

Obstreperousness

Funny falling awake

The tiniest violin

Oblivion

Plays for you

Like your mom said

Before the band tuned up

During intermission

Floated in like a giant

A giant balloon and its shadow

With the air let out

Ungainly playthings

Of these real scales

Do me wrong

We ascend when we should descend

Downlift

Got the spirit

Like Ayler broke down

Holy ghosts break wind

At the crossroads

 

———————————————————————————–

 

[Creation]

 

It is early and the devils are tuning up

It is early and yet we are singing

What this sound wave has to say

Being thronged and ohmed and ummed

Being a prepared piano for an action

In a bewildering and haunting echo

Of nature being a haunted house

Where to create is not to reproduce

That’s why we laugh and stick

Things up our ass lol

“Show us the pure tit”

Fucking up the Beach Boys acid phase

Fucking up Dylan’s harmonica

“I’ve found the pure tit”

“I’ve found it right here in Cologne”

“I think it’s perfectly comfortable”

Running your hand across an inflated balloon

Is the most unnatural (i.e., queerest) sound I’ve ever heard

“He did the funky chicken”

“He didn’t fuck the chicken”

Like Godz in heat, Caged heat, amplify a wrapper—

Overhear this creation

Looking forward to Dolmen Music

Whatisthismusicobscuredbyvoicewhatisthisvoiceobscuredbymusic?

What does J.E. know that the Beach Boys don’t?

This interview with chickens

I first thought them devils

Over hella flutes and light gong

The voices are getting closer

And we almost recognize their song

But what is being created?

Triangle, piano, lunge

“We’ve been rehearsing this scene for a very long time”

“I think it’s time we showed the full spectrum”

This is the full spectrum (of what?)

Gesture of that harmonica, gesture of that accordion

“I’ve found the pure tit”

“Where did you find it?”

“Right here in Cologne”

“It’s hard to believe”

“Pure tits aren’t usually found in Germany”

Latex spread this difference

Tinkles, twinkles, voices, instantly, this child

“They had 5 children”

“They had 4 animals too”

Unnatural (i.e., queer) as a cat in heat (socially unreproduced)

Creation is tearing

It is wearing

It is daring

It is faring

It is hurrying

It is hearing

“You can’t define”

 

———————————————————————————–

[Statement]

Attention to the music of Julius Eastman has had a major resurgence (one might more accurately say resurrection) since I started writing these poems roughly three years ago. Contributing to this resurgence have been countless performances of his works internationally in spaces for visual art, music, and contemporary dance, as well as an increasing amount of scholarship devoted to the composer. When I turned to Eastman, it was largely on account of my longtime interest in his milieus, principally that of the University of Buffalo and Upstate New York in the late 60s and early 70s, and of Manhattan’s Downtown and Disco scenes in the late 70s and 80s. Many poems from the larger manuscript of “Eastman” are engaged with these milieus and the intricate and intense social histories which they embody. Likewise, as with many of the poems I have written after artists and art works over the years, “Eastman” has offered me an opportunity to explore aesthetic practices other than my own and develop new (to myself) techniques for writing. For instance, a simple procedure that guides many of the poems here is to only write while listening to Eastman’s recorded music, a procedure I developed in the spirit of the “structured improvisations” of the composer’s collaborator, Arthur Russell. Yet another procedure which has guided the project is that of transcribing words and sounds. In the case of the former, I have a tendency to mishear (sung) language, which leads to some interesting transliterative effects, but which may also take-up what Fred Moten calls the “non-reduction of phonic substance,” a concept that has been generative both for my writing and teaching practices for over a decade. As the project deepens, and I listen more deeply—not just to Eastman’s works in themselves, but for their socio-political contexts and occasions—the richer and more nuanced I feel my relationship with the music becomes. Given Eastman’s penchant for allegory, and for a sort of virtuosic tricksterism, such a richness would seem inexhaustible despite the tragic dearth of his archive (many of his works were never recorded or recorded badly, and many of his scores were lost in a housing eviction in the late 80s, not long before his death at 49). This project is also indebted to the collective efforts of many scholars and thinkers who have made Eastman’s archive possible, not least of all Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach whose groundbreaking anthology, Gay Guerrilla, provides an invaluable resource for understanding Eastman’s biography and work. The music library at SUNY-Buffalo was kind enough to grant me access to otherwise unavailable archival recordings of Eastman performances, which accounts for the poems “Macle” and “440.” Thank you in particular to John Bewley, Associate Librarian and Archivist at the library.

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Raised in Ithaca, NY, Julius Eastman (October 27, 1940-May 28, 1990) was a composer, instrumentalist, performer, and singer. As a professor at the University at Buffalo in the late 60s and early 70s, he worked with the S.E.M. Ensemble and Creative Associates under Lukas Foss and Morton Feldman. Upon moving to New York City in the mid-70s, he collaborated extensively with many of those considered vital to the Downtown music scene, including famously Meredith Monk and Arthur Russell. His composition Stay on It (1973), while often attributed to Minimalism, anticipates House and Techno music in its emphasis on micro-rhythmic variation, as well as through its synthesis of numerous divergent musical genres, including European classical, pop, and jazz. By foregrounding his identity as Gay and Black through the titling of his compositions, formal aspects of his compositions, and his dispositions as a performer, he challenged the dominant minimalist and post-Cageian sensibilities of his era, injecting them with post-Stonewall, post-Black Power urgencies. Until the release of his collection Unjust Malaise with New World Records in 2005, and the subsequent championing of his music by composer-scholars Jace Clayton, Mary Jane Leach, George E. Lewis, and Renée Levine Packer, Eastman was virtually forgotten by music history and a broader culture.

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Thom Donovan is the author of numerous books, including Withdrawn (Compline, 2017), The Hole (Displaced Press, 2012) and Withdrawn: a Discourse (Shifter, 2016). He co-edits and publishes ON Contemporary Practice. He is also the editor of Occupy Poetics (Essay Press, 2015); To Look At The Sea Is To Become What One Is: an Etel Adnan Reader (with Brandon Shimoda; Nightboat Books, 2014), Supple Science: a Robert Kocik Primer (with Michael Cross; ON Contemporary Practice, 2013), and Wild Horses Of Fire. His current projects include a book of poems and other writings based upon the compositions of Julius Eastman, a book of critical essays regarding poetics, political practice, and the occult, and an ongoing “ante-memoir” entitled Left Melancholy.

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With thanks to Centre for Contemporary Arts: Glasgow for permissions to embed the Julius Eastman Creative Associates Tour (Part 1) 1974 video.