"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.

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"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.

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