Available Formats:
Digital Stream
Description
Gary and Fred were introduced by his son, Notice Recordings founder Evan Lindorff-Ellery. After hearing each others work, they decided to try to collaborate. Several meetings later they recorded what you are listening to now.
About the poems, Gary writes:
My “sand-blasted”poems are comprised of stacked fragments that tell a story that isn’t all there, but enough of it is there for our imaginations to stitch together a dreamlike narrative. Here is my process: I pull 10 books from my library, books on diverse subjects. I open each book to random pages, selecting approximately ten fragments per book without controlling the selection process, which is 90 percent random. After I have a list of 100 or more fragments, I shrink the font so I can’t distinguish any of the words and I shuffle the list so that no three phrases are in the original order. Then I divide the list into stanzas of three or four lines. Only then do I read what I have. Usually there is a story or more than one story, like a palimpsest, but also it is like a damaged spider web. The last thing I do is move a handful of lines around and repeat one or two lines, at irregular intervals, that seem to stand out such as the line “you don’t need to leave”. And I pick an evocative line to serve as the title and call it finished. But the point is, the story or stories of sand-blasted poems are not my invention, any more than dreams are the invention of my conscious mind. I use this technique when I am stuck, when I am high and dry, like someone marooned on a tiny island with one palm tree in the middle of the ocean. Picture sand-blasted poems as long makeshift bridges.
About the music Fred writes: While Gary’s poems are pre composed to one extent or another, the music is improvised and changes with each reading. This is made apparent by the inclusion of alternate takes of a couple of the pieces. Although Gary’s texts are set, they evoke so many different images from one listen to the next, I feel comfortable exploring different aspects of both the meaning and the sound of the readings.
Released in:
2024
