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about

Created immediately before a Lantern Memorial remembrance for the victims of the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, the track features a poem published with the University of Texas, El Paso, entitled, "Lugubrious Background Nearing an Electro-Magnetic Haze". The piece, transformed into narrative sound art through the trajectory of experimental music, is essentially about the explosive omnipresence of America juxtaposed with its remoteness. The marginal landscapes of America are the birthplace for one of the the world's greatest questions: atomic energy. The poem, "Lugubrious Background..." begins in the traditional lands of the American Southwest, with its rich history of Original Peoples. That history becomes estranged into small-town marginality by the overwhelming shadow of a towering American presence. Leading finally to the sounds of New York, the sirens of immigration and post-colonial history remove the people further from the true and original history of the land, until, finally, the inside becomes outside, and the electrified modernization of progress displaces connectivity in nature with a sheen of bright lights. The outside has transformed to the inside, and without a way out, people are terminally trapped by misperception and ignorance.

The musical instrumentation on the track, "Lugubrious Background" speaks to another contemporaneous event, namely the 400th year anniversary of the first treaty between Europeans and Native Americans. On the same day as people remembered the bombing of Nagasaki, canoes waded down Hudson River to New York City to meet delegates of the UN to not only celebrate World Indigenous Day, but to remember the beginning of a formal international relationship between Native Americans and European settlers, begun by the Iroquois Confederacy and the Dutch Kingdom. So, the instrumentation on this track, a frame drum (bodhran) and a xaphoon (bamboo sax) speaks to a renewed history of American tradition. The modern frame drumming techniques of North America have spawned an entirely new way of hearing and playing the frame drum. Although using a bodhran, the frame drum is a universal instrument known throughout the Original Traditions of Native Americans across Turtle Island. Similarly, the xaphoon is likened to a refreshed jazz tradition, wherefrom Hawaii a new saxophone was invented only thirty years ago. The sound of the fame drum with a bamboo sax conjures American sentiments from the historical age beyond the contemporary into the imagination of a future where co-existence revives cultural tradition.

lyrics

A paradigmatic focus
Careening into the absolute beyond
Across a Zuni passageway to the pueblo god,
A local currency in stonework and mud-laden factories of 4 and 7
Meandering into the nervous plug of human fire
Uncreated instantaneously
In the muddled birdcage wandering off a steaming factory
Unplanned off the aspiring edge of small town fame
Glowering in the lugubrious background of a juvenile
Staved off in matter’s roving blockhead gourd body
Plunging its eyes into acid water full with psychedelic vibrations
Nearing an electromagnetic haze
In wonderment by lost forsaken pride
Seated behind piano benches creaking
As Monk sways to the jazz tonality in the bridge beyond NYC night divide,
The lightless ruins, now golden by African wives
Challenging the gunshot parade of men with sex slaves and witch doctor friends
Making films and records without shoes
On the medieval sands of the Islamic family and the eternal human tradition of bondage
Throughout the sanctified fields of one human home
Lived to the final digression into creative madness and the right to be
As connected as all beings
With electric happiness
Outside

credits

from Evocations: district​.​Columbia, released June 18, 2013

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about

Rusty Kjarvik Brooklyn, New York

My ancestors are from the lands in and around what is now Norway, Poland, Germany and Greece. They lived above the Arctic Circle, spoke Yiddish, were Romaniote Greek, English settlers during the revolutionary war of America, and from Germany pioneered in 19th century Alberta, Canada where they also took Blackfoot names. They were buried in religious fame; and so I also go by Menachem ben Asser. ... more

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