"The Harmattan Haze" video and comments

We have a new video from Poems for Broken Screens. This piece is called ‘The Harmattan Haze’.

This piece was initiated by a fascination with the mass of dust that travels across the Atlantic ocean from the Sahara and descends on us in the southern US. The sky turns a tan color and we inhale African sand from across the world. It seems to alter mood and tone similar to the Santa Ana winds in Southern California, but more subtly. For years, I barely noticed it.

So for the piece, I combined the idea of one part of the world drifting to another, how it alters the feel of our experiences here, with a kind of love poem.

From the beginning I knew this was an atmospheric piece for Hilly. She has an ability to be quiet and mysterious in her delivery and nailed the tone on the first reading. I created a synthesized sound bed for it that looped but never exactly repeated, like wind patterns.

I remember listening to the Santa Ana’s one night and it was like hearing the landscape breathing, but at long intervals and geographic scale. A huge rush of air would come through the mountains from the desert at ten minute intervals all night long. Inhale, exhale. In a way that’s difficult to define, the Santa Ana’s seemed to change how everything felt, not only landscape and light, but mood and the perception of time. While the effect of the Harmattan Haze is subtle, its reach spans vast distances. So I was also thinking about how to define time that felt stretched out. This is the longest, slowest piece in Poems. Making slow, quiet work is a challenge we enjoy and it is counter to everything the internet and media have become. That it doesn’t work well in social media or on phones is a feature, not a bug.

Paul Slavens opens the piece with a voice of god narration, like a radio host, which he just so happens to be. And there’s a section at the end where Kit performs Morse code with her voice, spelling out “dust”. Hilly says “We have so much in common, us and the…” and then Kit performs “dust” in Morse. I remember asking Kit “can you do Morse code with your voice?” Of course she can. Don’t try this at home.

‘The Harmattan Haze’ considers how weather and landscape can affect our internal states, and how relationships themselves are like weather. So much of contemporary life and culture pretend to live unaffected by environment when, as it becomes ever more clear each year, we are fully subject to it, internally and externally.

See more videos on our YouTube channel

"a walk among the trees" - video and comments

From the Newsletter:
We’ve released a new video from the Poems for Broken Screens performance. It’s one of the first of 24 that will be part of the film of the project. “a walk among the trees” was the second piece in the show at ATTPAC and features a tour de force solo performance by our new guest performer Kit Presley.

This piece came together in the studio after many practice runs over several months, and though the words remained the same, the soundscape Kit created was different every time. This perfectly exemplifies our approach to making live media with a balance of improvisation, precision, and varying dynamics.

The piece is one of several in this project that deal with our complex, often contradictory relationship with the natural world. It also furthers our exploration of the limits of language and verbal description. The first half of the piece is fairly easy to interpret, but then it veers into more difficult-to-define territory. In the script, the last lines are written as “…they found you / and you found ______” with the underline indicating where Kit is to improvise a sound instead of saying a word. In the end, the sound is a scream, which is what you see and hear in this final performance from June 3. Her vocal sounds are the best possible expression of the state she finds herself in. A word will not do.

An excerpt from the book of Poems for Broken Screens:

This piece follows directly from the opening, with Kit (KP) still on stage already making sounds. It’s continues the relationship theme but has a higher degree of abstraction. Some of what the words reference is open ended. In fact, in an early rehearsal I was asked “How is this supposed to be read? What is the tone?” I wasn’t sure, and needed it to hear it being read, which happens a lot. Sometimes things write themselves, and I’m as surprised by anyone. The best pieces are born in mystery. The work to fully realize them is intentional and often analytical but the rule is to maintain the mystery and to strip everything away that detracts from the tone, and amplify and hone the things that contribute to it. Sometimes it’s like subtractive sculpture where you sort of know where you want, but the final form is revealed through the process.

On its face the piece is about getting away from an unpleasant situation and into nature as a respite and escape from technology as well as from “profession or marriage or obsession“. But then it veers off into fill-in-the-blank-with-your-own-projections territory with “they found you… and you found ______” This piece extends the approach to sound from the previous one. With the line “you found _______” the fill in the blank is space for KP to improvise a vocal sound. At this point in the piece the volume is loud, layered, and distorted and her vocal noises are, again, the best possible expression of the state she finds herself in. A word will not do.

This piece is, other than the words in the script, fully improvised by KP. Like many others, it’s electronic jazz. Playing with the inadequacy or words and language while using language is one of the ongoing strategies in Therefore.

This piece was based around KP’s ability to layer diverse loops of improvised vocal sounds. I had seen her do this many times in the studio and it was a good fit for this piece, which was initially performed by someone else. It also provided KP with a solo moment, and she made the abstraction and open form of it work through her powerful delivery.

See more videos on our YouTube channel.

Poems for Broken Screens

Hi everyone,
Announcing the next major Therefore Performance coming June 1-3 2023 AT&T Performing Arts Center.

This show will again feature lead performers Hilly Holsonback and Abel Flores, along with Patrick Murphy on synthesizers and samplers. We have several new guest artists including local legend Paul Slavens on keys and young talent Kit Presley performing improvisational vocals.
As always, the Therefore experience will include compelling performance art, live video art, projections, and immersive sound. We’ve been listed as “Best Alternative Theater” and “If there’s an avant-garde performance art in Dallas, Therefore is it.”

We hope to see you there.

To keep up with us as we prepare for the event see @therefore on Instagram

Poems for Broken Screens by Therefore Art, Sound + Performance Group
8 PM June 1-3
AT&T Performing Arts Center Dallas

Tickets are selling now here

Belief at the Speed of Memes

Meme beliefs evolve at the speed of computation. They ignite across networks, splinter, decay, and transform. They feedback on themselves, self amplifying and distorting as they go. By contrast, traditional religions seem dull and immutable, blanketed in featureless dust, despite marketing efforts to redress them into currency.

Meme religions are fun, and made of pixels. Their velocity increases because the fuel is plentiful: identity confirming clicks, swipes, and psyops. But they are featureless: low rez, blocky, often nostalgic representations of things that never were in the first place, with the inconvenient and boring parts left out. The more removed from the source the more value they hold. Clip art images of ordinary rocks are worth well more than actual diamonds. Crypto Punks, selling for tens of thousands as NFT’s for their generative uniqueness, are somehow entirely unrepresentative of those dizzy, drug addled days. We were fully fungible then, and not at all cute.

Theologian Paul Tillich defined religion as an “ultimate concern.” What is the ultimate concern of cryptocurrency believers? The co-founder of Dogecoin, who abandoned the project, noted the the emerging industry was filled with “white libertarian bros sitting around hoping to get rich and coming up with buzzword-filled business ideas.” Recent crypto believers may be largely unaware of the ideological foundations of Bitcoin and other crypto, and their fervor springs from other sources like FOMO and YOLO. Their ultimate concern may be belongingness, and an identifiable but evolving sense of group identity.

Is it possible that the speed and transience of meme beliefs are features as well as a bugs? That in auditioning multiple micro beliefs we are left with a pragmatic residue of strategies, of modular perspectives? Maybe, but we are just as likely to be left with the wreckage of addictions, a patchwork of conspiratorial illusions, toxic advertising and entertainment imagery, and web worn think tank propaganda. It’s not like most of us can see foundational beliefs anyway. Occasionally they are exposed, revealing their lack of mooring and dissonance with other, barely detectable assumptions. But mostly our foundations are assumed, like gravity, time, and the electric grid. Whoops.

If there’s an upside to transient belief surfing it is rehearsal and adaptation, but with a failure rate on par with day trading. Unseriousness is a benefit when trying on funny hats and partial world views because we are forced to play like preschoolers with crude but colorful building blocks. One hundred and forty years on, it’s much worse than Nietsche warned. Not only did we kill God but we replaced them with scams: money scams, art scams, a president scam, belief scams. The digital life rewards lack of seriousness with influence. Science is serious, and in popularized form promises an understandable, rational world. It is a foundation, if a fuzzy one, for most secular beliefs. But it doesn’t really offer a salve for our anxieties the way Dogecoin does (or did, or might still.)

The best case is that by auditioning perspectives at the speed of memes it is possible that tensions are revealed, fissures exploited in underlying assumptions, and new foundations are laid, even if pinned on top of others. Then again, it could just be more noise and we appear as floaties in the Pacific Ocean garbage vortex, bobbing around in our own plastic detritus. Maybe the entire internet is one endlessly repeating rickroll; meme belief surfing on metaverse pixel waves, shielding us from the contingencies of weather, nature, and our flesh wrapped vulnerabilities. Unless of course if you timed Gamestop perfectly. Boat!

In the end though, there’s something important latent in digital worlds and objects, we are just not sure what it is. Maybe it is speed itself, and paper handedness as virtue rather than sin. That somehow darting about and letting go is the path that allows us to blissfully hover and spin together in the illusory certainty of code and mathematics. Just as we can sense maybe there is a mind behind all the matter, or none at all, we can sense digital meaning may be the only future meaning. It isn’t a matter of misplacing the concrete real but of replacing it; relocating it, again and again.

Memes are cartoons for adults, and online beliefs are cartoon guides to reality. Flittering from one meme to the next keeps us occupied, limbs spinning in an infinite hold moment, only to realize we have no business with infinity. ♾