papyrusoxyrhynchus

[papyrusoxyrhynchus]

(inc)re(asing/cent)ly (ir)relevant listening

capricornas pneumatici - nibbas (1989)

jeff stonehouse - mariners willow (2015)

graham lambkin - salmon run (2007)

moniek darge - crete soundies (2010)

hazard - land (2002)

glauco salvo - 5 haiku (2016)

world counsellor - untitled (2017)

astor - alcor (2012)

urban sax - s/t (1977)

nijiumu - era of sad wings (1993)

matthew p. hopkins - nocturnes (2014)

therabaqud leic - curved bells mirrors (1988)

[papyrusoxyrhynchus]

notes from ‘without silence shimmer violently’

field recordings linearly capture a particular impression of an environment that is populated with what are essentially superfluous and incidental waves of pressure, the consequences of energy transfer and expenditure. these recordings do not, however, adequate as a representation of the environment in which they are produced. they are hopeless, preposterously limited in scope, inscribed by all-too-human technologies; they cannot represent anything other than themselves, although they nevertheless try. in every field recording there is an a priori decision (or, at the very least, an awareness of the necessity of making this decision) to commence and to cease recording at some point or another, a not necessarily but frequently ‘artistic’ or ‘curatorial’ decision that furtively cloaks itself and attempts to hide from view. collage, particularly when performed on the fly, serves a dual purpose here: on the one hand, it strips bare and multiplies the artistic decision(s) by emboldening it/them (through the creation of stutterings and disjunctures that show the malignant hand of the intervener at work); on the other, it creates a situation in which the recording no longer must fixate upon the circumstances of its dismal birth, in which its body loses its organ-isation and is continually reshaped, forming (a) novel and distinct regime(s) of signification and asignification. in this piece the two environments from which the original material is taken are different and, taken under standard compositional circumstances (layering/superimposition of large chunks of linear sound), incompatible with one another. collage, brutal and indifferent, liberating and alienating, opens the door for two to become one, and for one to violently shimmer and spike its way to zero.

[papyrusoxyrhynchus]

The reverence with which things cropping up in his daily life were inserted into the multilayered design and even buried deep within it may suggest echoes of Egyptian mortuary ritual, as if [he was] cornering valued parts of his experience and embalming them in order to defy the ravages of time.

(of course it is a complete lie, a self-conscious artistic project borne out of observation and reflection, and a desire to summate these physically ; as if schwitters was doing anything unintentional, as if his long walks through the streets of hanover searching for guttertrash were somehow part of an ‘ordinary’ quotidian post-war german experience ; the ‘artist’, comfortable and in all seriousness unchallenged by anything of import [as if constructing the merzbau posed any significant threat to the stability of his existence], is able to ape the urchins and vagabonds for whom the accrual of detritus is imperative for their biological continu(ation/ity) ; lies we tell ourselves to sleep soundly when in all actuality we need to sleep furiously)