Program Note
One thing I have always found remarkable in Chris Mann’s poetry performances is the careful use and positioning of the microphone. For me, the microphone is not there merely to amplify the loudness of the voice—it is there for the purposes of orchestration. The microphone allows the observer to witness those infinitesimal moments during which silence/consonant, consonant/vowel, vowel/silence intrude upon one another in the somewhat ‘brusque’ manner that, in my own listening, captures the signature of that most particular voice. These intrusions have a distinct timbral quality that is at once equal to and other than the text being performed. It is almost as if it were the non-identity of the text that is being performed as much as the text.
discourse/current is an attempt to make music with a poem that is already music—in this case, Chris Mann’s in representing. In my own treatment of one performance of this poem, very brief fragments of spoken voice are recorded, then filtered, compressed, and very slightly stretched. This, in order to slightly ‘dramatize’, acoustically, the smallest though still projective moments available within those fragments. In taking such an attitude regarding computational mediation, my intent here is to "stay with the material," rather than treating it as mere subject matter for transformation (a canonic compositional attitude that, nevertheless, almost always tells more about the technique, as cultural means, than it does of the material). These very brief excerpts (or ‘samples’, if you will) are further atomized, and then combined with the barest of sonic materials—sine tones, filtered noise, and silence—to form fragments that are still only the beginning of another music. There are ten such fragments organized serially. Each presents a minimally articulated musical structure, each delimited by the sounding of a single DTMF tone. At a higher temporal level, four longer partitions may suggest a gradual decay of the projective power of the spoken text and of the articulative quality of acoustical materials more generally.
As is the case on various structural levels within the piece, most sounds are characteristically flat in structure: flat envelopes, extremely low amplitude (some sounds bordering on the barely audible), sudden onsets and cut-offs, spectrally simple sounds with narrow bandwidth, and long silences. The intent is for an overall musical coherence that articulates simple surfaces rather than fully developed morphologies. In this regard, discourse/current attempts to resist the rather centripetal force of the spoken text while affirming its disjunct—and therefore anti-communicative—discursive framework.
While the piece is not intended as an "open" work per se, the listener is encouraged to pick out individual tracks, or contiguous groups of tracks, for repeated listening, in much the same manner that one returns to favorite pages in multi-paged poems. In this regard, while the piece is conceived as a whole, its individual parts can also constitute smaller wholes in themselves.
Please Note: Some of the sounds in this piece are indeed extremely quiet.
Chris Mann: In representing you to me, the state makes pretty bills (But a you is not a motive and neither false nor true (facts a yellow narrative), the fictively indifferent journalist effect): Til two tills in bed are found displayed and organised, the proxy and the box. Anyway, she'd already been outed as a know-all by the Britannica: But blue be just a riff with pictures - a pun is a fantasy, a libidinal think in it's pink complicits: Nice hyphen. And coz abstractions are ambivalent in English, a list of opaque negative. It, the attempted amnesiac (greed - the populist theory) claims me as symptom, and what a nag - paranoia exorcises best what won't be found. A putschist crat, a farce of lines and cue what justify the bits is then around. Banal. Ownership, the neurotic intelligence (the stupid grace intransitive, a superstitious teevee protocol (intelligence, the dress rehearsal of stupidity) (repetition and the mechanics of the knowing silence)) of the masochist, a sarcas: Dolly obvious (a therapy in some parts), a worry impotent: Language, bargaining the right to speak, the jerk's jam (censorship is cheap transcendence) mam (stupidity is all I has to give), all the evidence for words is in and but it stinks - only the sceptic quotes. As though evidence were competent. (Reading underwrites the better left - the embarrassment of the live truism.) And the tawdry more.