Detail from large collage

Surrealist Camera

Harlequin Caves

Surfin' Croc and the Sunglasses

Contagious Grin

Tides...of Course

The Chimpanzee and the Dragonfly

More Wine?

That's Better, Thanks

Urban Force Field Cards

Dancing Laughs

Attempt to think of a room

The room falls into the sea from the north as if cliffside. It could be out of
sorts with air surf anti matter gum threads opening in the southeast. It's the
roots of the sea in the bowling vessels that stabilize the angle. It's a fold
along space where echoes collect, leaving lines on the floor, living shadows
with which to dance and write, to break into the world with this rolling
unconscious of history.

The room opens onto a cliff in the other direction, stalking higher and
higher an obsessive angle leading gravity down to the airport valley and
Colombia slough to the north. Wet snakes slip through rivers and seas to the
north west of the room. From time to time there are fireworks in the fans.
Whispers, breaths of wind in dust memes of apocalypse stirred by the raccoons of
turgid fury.

The tunnel's exit is an obstacle course that doesn't hold its shape.

---Attempt to poetically psycho-geographize a room, and think in extended and
microscopic spacial terms.

The Messenger

Qkcofse: Flywheel Imp

My second album of experimental noise and ambient improvisation has been released via suRRIsm-Phonoethics and the Free Music Archive. Here's one link to download or listen: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Qkcofse/Flywheel_Imp/

Ruthless Critique

This being arrived just before the power went out and said he'd watch me change:



I managed to take a picture of myself while it happened:




And one more as I lost my shape:



I woke up in a cave where I met this couple:



He told me how it happened with holographic letters:



just in time for our transport.

Patricide Four: The Sound of Surrealism

Many surrealists have written about music and sound in the last several decades, most notably LaDonna Smith, Davey Williams, Johannes Bergmark, Franklin Rosemont, Paul Garon, Ted Joans, Hal Rammel, Ron Sakolsky, Michael Vandelaar, Eric Bragg and otheors. Patricide Four is following in a similar vein, but doesn't include or reference all these authors in its tentative examination of surrealism and music. The book is one contribution to the study of this enjoyable subject and makes no claim to completeness. The limited edition publication also includes a 42 track CD.

The most interesting material concerns surrealists and interested others engaged in music, noise, and sound collage pursuits. There are a series of questions presumably put together by editor Neil Coombs which are answered to various degrees by Bergmark, Bragg, James Nice, and Matthias Schuster. All who replied share some common ground in that they value chance, improvisation and the subconscious, and all feel that surrealism has directly or indirectly influenced the work of 20th century musicians, although Nice gives more credit to Futurism and Dada. Nice seems to have a biased view which relates more to past rather than present surrealism. The question regarding the aural medium and surrealism is posed to him with surrealism being situated in the past tense which I find curious. His interview also contains several factual errors, but I’m intrigued by the compilation Surrealism Reviewed CD he released in 2002.

Among the responses to Coombs’ questions, there is agreement that a kind of magic or alchemy is involved in music making, although these phrases are described in poetic metaphorical terms rather than in a mystical context. When speaking of sound collage, Bragg makes an analogy with alchemy because the assembled fragments or basic materials when subjected to transformation, produce a new whole. Also of interest are the answers to the question regarding the difference between surrealism and avant-garde sound. Bergmark and Nice said there is no difference, with the former placing emphasis on the creators’ self-identification and intention, while Schuster said there was, because to him avant-garde sound is more cerebral than surrealist sound which comes from different angles. I tend to agree more with Schuster here because conceptual sound works seem to come from, or speak to different levels of cognitive process than surrealism might. I agree there are parallels and overlaps.

There is a section entitled ‘Writing on Sound by Various Artists’ which contains Ron Sakolsky’s account of the aborted/postponed book project on surrealism and sound with Franklin Rosemont who died in 2009 as well as his own topical musings. There’s an excerpt from Breton’s Silence is Golden essay which originally appeared in English in 1946 as well as in Franklin Rosemont’s What Is Surrealism compilation of Breton’s texts in the late 1970’s, which proves Nice wrong that Breton wasn’t interested in music. Breton’s comments about unifying hearing and sight through awareness of inner poetry and inner music which are inseparable offer many points of departure. Edgard Varese who mingled with surrealists in the 1950’s chimes in along with W.E.B. Dubois, Humphrey Jennings, E.L.T. Mesens and Erik Satie. Horace Mayer Kallen writes on swing, Michael Vandelaar on black music, and there’s an excerpt from my noise article which appeared in Hydrolith. There’s also a dialogue between several people from a 1947 Possibilities magazine.

Other contents include Bill Howe’s automatic texts written in response to the sounds of Charles Mingus and Johannes Bergmark, Richard Misiano-Genovese on sonic awareness and sleep deprivation, Kevin Logan on sounds of destruction, Adrian Dannatt on Welsh concrete sound poetry, my prepared guitar piece, and two Bergmark articles related to Christopher Small, the latter of which is a response to a critic of his first article written for Swedish music circles. There are various points of interest and things I disagree with within these articles as well as a handful of more literary pieces, but it’s hard for me to take much of an interest in the latter because of my desire to return again and again to the writings on sound.

The audio CD contains more than an hour of sounds from contributors. Of the most interest are the 18 sonic exquisite corpses which editor Coombs has compiled from loosely themed 30 second segments sent by different musicians and sound artists; these tracks were then randomly edited and layered together. I find the dense subtleties of these tracks rather engaging. There are also a few remixes of these audio corpses by people other than Coombs. While I generally enjoyed the music, it seems worth it to ask what is it that makes some of these sounds necessarily surrealist? There are a lot of electronic and ambient tracks and very little from the jazz, blues minimal improv, or urban/field music end of things for example. I’m not saying this is the editors' fault, and nor do I want to prioritize traditional musical forms in a surrealist oriented compilation, but it would have been nice to hear more diversity to round out the CD.


See http://www.patricide.co.uk for ordering information or write to Dark Windows Press, 72 Llandudno Rd, Rhos-on-Sea, Conwy, UK.

Plasma Idolatry

With the Photon Gargoyle

Angye Gaona

Colombian writer and surrealist comrade Angye Gaona is accused of drug trafficking and rebellion by a police state regime, which could result in an up to 20 year prison sentence. In a tense political climate the case seems motivated by repressive interests as she is a well-known cultural critic and activist. Her trial is to begin on January 23rd. More international attention in the interests of solidarity with poetry and free speech is called for. Follow the links below for more information.


http://les-risques-du-journalisme.over-blog.com/article-mobilization-for-the-colombian-poet-angye-gaona-97064304.html


http://robberbridegroom.blogspot.com/2012/01/act-now-to-defend-poet-angye-gaona.\
html

http://www.facebook.com/events/316979401670258/

Bedroom Set

Inner Sound Masks

Sado-Masochism is an endless, so-small Crazy Jane that has not been the other manifesto amongst us in my drunk tankards which persist to listen entranced as a number of different senses.

Love's quest is the brooding abstractions bearing lone vast silence of freed inner sound masks in social villages, confirming totemic exile wilderness of distinct heresy behind the world-soul torture.

--Word collage based on dice rolls

Class War Karaoke #16

I've a short track included on the 16th edition of Class War Karaoke compiled by Anthony Donovan, Adrian, Jaan Patterson and friends. It includes 58 pieces of music, 11 short-films, and contributor texts.

Click on the title above to access the sounds and related links, or copy/paste this link to listen or download:

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Classwar_Karaoke/0016_survey/


The texts are available here:

http://classwarkaraoke.blogspot.com/2011/08/0015-survey-31st-august-2011.html


The films can be found at:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL51540144A91D127D

Patricide 4: The Sound of Surrealism

Patricide 4 - 'The Sound of Surrealism' is now available as a book and CD
package.

The CD includes 42 tracks from Johannes Bergmark, Jude Cowan, Bedwyr Williams, Eric Bragg, Ribitch, Matthias Schuster, Minima, Daniel Lehan, Eze Chimalio, Richard Sanderson, Lesley Guy, Neil Webb, The Sonic Egg, Leona Jones, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Kevin Logan, the Patricide International, and more.

The book features:

Bill Howe : Automatic Texts
Johannes Bergmark : Music is a Verb! Music is Nothing
Jude Cowan : Orbyhage
David Berridge : The Ears of Claude Cahun
Brandon Freels : Bull's Eye
Joe Pulver : A Dull Clatter of Proper Teacups
Shibek : Noise Walking with Prepared Guitar
Vincent Dachy : Vocal Chords
Kevin Logan : I Need the Noises of Destruction
Richard Misiano-Genovese : Sleep Deprivation
Paul Buck : Spread Wider Than Before
Adrian Dannatt : On the Welsh Sound Scene
Ron Sakolsky : Unheard Soundscape

The book also includes extracts from and new translations of writings by
Edgard Varèse, André Breton, Virgil Thomson, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Erik Satie, Michael Vandelaar, E.L.T. Mesens, and more.

For ordering information, see

http://www.patricide.co.uk/

Question and Answer with random magazines

What's a trampoline?
A terrible error.
For magnets?
For snow!
How does it affect the funny bone?
It's the second guilty plea.
So what is the brilliant idea?
The jackass groin video.
Where does it snoop?
Your fragile, furious faith.

The Mime Reached Out Her Hand

They Lay In Wait

Desire in a Book show

Friends from the St. Louis Surrealist Group have put this exhibition together. Click on the image for a closer view.

Surrealism in 2012: Towards the World of the Fifth Sun

The Surrealism in 2012 show opens in January 2012 at the GoggleWorks Center in Reading, Pennsylvania. Click on the title for more information.

Joel Williams, Patricide, Oystercatcher

I recently received nearly a dozen smaller-sized books from Joel Williams. They are wonderfully colorful with titles like Red Skies, Serpentine, Anatomy, and Landscape. Many of the intriguing and playful drawings and collages suggest oneiric machines interacting with, and like, bodies on the sub-atomic level. Nudes features numerous spherical shapes arranged on various landscapes, which provokes a variety of complex and subtle emotions. Red Skies is probably my favorite book, with its glossy mixes of reds, orange and yellow backgrounds and perturbing constructions of surrational machinery, but all the books are a marvel. Williams has been in various exhibitions and collaborates with the Chicago Surrealists.

Patricide 3: Surrealism and the Uncanny. This 200 page journal-sized issue examines The Place of Memory, Documenting the Uncanny, Revolutionary Moments, and Uncanny Poetics. Contributors include Neil Coombs, Nicholas Royle, Mattias Forshage, Renay Kerkman, Brandon Freels, Stephanie Skura, J.K. Bogartte, Joe Pulver, and others. Editor Coomb's essay on Buttes-Chaumont, Kerkman's piece on the Ouisi Board, and Forshage's commentary on horror cinema are among the high points so far. There is also a section on surrealism in the Middle East. Documentary photos include Portland's own sidewalk teeth. Go to www.patricide.co.uk to order a copy.

The Oystercatcher. An occasional magazine from Denman Island, Canada with a blend of anarcho-surrealist, creative, critical and regional material. Issue 8 features a Mayday introduction, collages and poems, reviews and commentary on Tunisia, the Ishmaelites, Haymarket Scrapbook, Surrealism and queer desire, Vanishing Art, notes on Vancouver counter-cultural history, and more. There is a collage by the departed Don LaCoss that springs the levers of objective chance. Send a donation for a copy; Ron Sakolsky, A-4062 Wren Road, Denman Island BC, Canada, VOR 1TO

Cthulhu and the Surrealist Djinn

ENCOUNTER

Leonora Carrington, Jean Benoit

I wanted to give a shout out to Leonora Carrington who recently died. She was 94, living in Mexico. Her contributions to surrealism and the creative world in general are immense; she led a colorful life of black humor and adventure, some of it tragic. Her imaginative works, critical spirit and intelligent revolt is an inspiration. So I honor her name now along with Jean Benoit who died last year. Let some of her paintings be placed randomly by Benoit's animated Sadean costume.

Jump From The Brain Orgasm They Do

The Return of Captain Shibboleth

Monkey Ears and the Golden Owl

You Will Be Apalled (Five Books)

I told him, instead of feeling it shift position, these modern Romans’ words belched in frenzy.

My attention was captured. You will be appalled, to say the least; one thing leads to another.

Incidentally, the Philosophers’ Stone! A coherent picture of the universe, this steamy carnival. Pale enthusiast, in a word-- Universal Analogy.

An intellectual construction sank heavily out of sight, beloved woman clinging to some balcony.

But Newport, 1765, a crime of my own, into emblems--core of a paranoiac illness.

For the child as entirely new, to take on a more disturbing bulk, a carved doorway, I can still see.

Possession of the minds of desire.

Driven by vague resemblance differently.

The child must learn what you least expect.


--Mixed phrases selected by chance (with minor edits) from the following books:
Wrong Numbers by Franklin Rosemont
The Custom House of Desire: A Half-Century of Surealist Stories, ed. J.H. Mattews
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
Juliette by the Marquis DeSade
Waking up Screaming, H.P. Lovecraft

sPE_0100

I've added a track to Peak the Source, suRRism-PhonoEthics' 100th release. This three volume project features dozens of improvised, ambient, electronic, noise/glitch, and unclassified sound artists. Click on the title above or copy and paste the link below to download or have a listen.

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/suRRism-Phonoethics_sPE_0100/

April Fools' Gesture

Playtime with the Jack of Hearts

Class War Karaoke #13

I've added a short track to Class War Karoake Survey #13 which is compiled by Jaan Patterson, Anthony Donovan and friends. You can listen or download the album by clicking on the title above.

For Madame Lepidoptera

The constant peal of rising and falling snake's eyes
Wraps the tail of a tiny comet
Launched by collisions of subatomic machinery

It finds a way to my kinetic egg
Shape of biological exuberance
Into its dark tunnels I flash
Winged in phosphorous and foliage

I will be whirlwind of play
In subtle mannequins of surrender
Leaving them to unfold
Like a paper box
In your ears of surprise

Don LaCoss

Don LaCoss, radical scholar and writer, and member of the International Surrealist Movement, died on January 31st at age 46.

While we never met, I appreciated his comradely correspondence over the last decade. He generously sent multiple copies of pamphlets, articles and collages. In the last several years, among other places, his writings appeared in Benjamin Peret: A Menagerie in Revolt (Black Swan Press, 2009) and in the pages of the Fifth Estate. He also wrote a pamphlet on the surrealist presence during the May 1968 Parisian uprising and was working on a book about Egyptian and Arab surrealism* as well as a forthcoming issue of Fifth Estate when he died.

My empathy to his family and friends.

You can read more about him on this memorial page.

There are also some tributes here.

*Some of his writings on Egyptian and Arab Surrealism can be found in issues 21 and 22 of the magazine Communicating Vessels which are available for a (cash) donation or postage stamps from PO Box 83408, Portland, Oregon, 97283. I also highly recommend the aforementioned book on Peret which features Don's afterword entitled 'Benjamin Peret and the Ecological Imagination' where he wrote: "Poetry wrings out the repression that saturates our words and phrases by turning them inside out and knotting them together into stormy new topological geometries."

CHILDREN OF DAGON

(This article previously appeared in the Seaside Surrealism issue of Patricide.)

When I think of Seaside Surrealism, Lovecraft, Lamantia, and Lautreamont answer. These writers don’t present a unified theme or idea about the seaside as such, but because of their oceanic actions, they trespass upon it. They have related to the ocean in ways which remain suggestive and interesting to me.

Dagon was historically a Mesopotamian grain god with multiple names, said to have come from the sea or space. He is pictured as a man wearing a fish skin, or as a man with a fish tail. Zoom forward several thousand years and Dagon, in pop culture, has become a demonic sea monster and a name for black metal bands, situated alongside Leviathan or Cthulhu in the popular imagination. Some responsibility must belong to H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft’s short story Dagon presents an aquatic humanoid being discovered in a giant ocean crater, while Stuart Gordon’s film Dagon, based more around The Shadow Over Innsmouth, has him as a sea creature served in a gruesome manner by cultists. The most remarkable thing is that people in the decaying seaside town are making the transformation into humanoid aquatic creatures themselves. Some are able to live both at sea and on land. Many of them, in fact, are children of Dagon via human mothers and are looking forward to returning to the sea. Despite being a monster, Dagon helps them desert the human race and protects them.

In Maldoror by Lautreamont, Maldoror has a relationship with the waves. He embraces and makes love with a shark at sea, turns into an octopus, and salutes the Ancient Ocean. He wants to be buried at sea. He compares its immense depths to the depths of the human heart, yet concludes that the heart is deeper. He asks if the ocean is Satan’s abode. Despite his appreciation for the ocean’s expansive, unruly violence which terrifies humanity, towards the end of his rapture he reveals he cannot give all his love to the ocean which forces him to live among humanity, ‘the most buffoonish antithesis ever seen in creation.’ Maldoror is humbled by the power of the sea which he admits to visiting thousands of times.

Philip Lamantia, in his poem Voice of Earth Mediums, invokes the ocean’s waves as a weapon against rampant industrialism and a complacent civilization:
“If the complete crowd-manacled machine isn’t dissolved, back into the earth from where its elements were stolen, we shall call on The Great Ocean Wave, Neter of waters, and the King of Atlantis and his snake spirits, otherwise known as Orcus, Dagon, and Drack, to send up calamitous tidal waves-- a thousand feet high if need be—to bury all the monster metal cities and their billion, bullioned wheels of chemical death.”

Lamantia has claimed the Flood myth to speak in the language of apocalypse, from a passionate motivation to purge himself of disgust at modern civilization. The ocean will inundate the seaside while those who called upon Atlantis are sheltered from the deluge.

In summary, Lamantia suggests a fantastic occult relation with the ocean, Maldoror can cross over between sea and land but cannot stay at sea, and the Dagon cult has integrated the ocean and land. I will look at them for a moment.

Dagon’s children gradually become something other from within the shell of their apparent humanity. Their physical changes suggest our desires to escape the limits of the human form, to really live with the imagination. They are dangerous gifts, methodical madness, and species treason. The blasphemy that the Dagon cultists embody is the literal ‘creepy’ advance down a road where humans fear to tread—into interspecies becoming. The basic expressions of fish or frogs unsettle us when transferred to humans. Of course human-animal hybrids are familiar to the creative person, dreamer, shaman and child, and appear in world myth. The film’s community in the remote seaside town pursued with dedication a real-time mutation or permanent shapeshifting. I find complicity with the idea of mutation pursued for love or pleasure, but not all the features of horror cinema necessarily.

Despite living under cover in the human world, and being under the sway of the authoritarian priests who encouraged herd-like cruelty, the children of Dagon found an innocent freedom at sea while learning how to use their new bodies. How strange the weight of land gravity must be for those who live in the ocean part-time.

When I head to Seaside, Oregon, just west of me, and dive into the ocean, I want to have my gills ready. I’m growing them beneath my clothes so no one will know.

References:
1: Maldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautreamont, p.41. Translated by Alexis Lykiard. Exact Change, 1994.
2: Bed of Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems 1943-1993, by Philip Lamantia. City Lights, 1997.

To The Lighthouse

THE SKELETAL DOMINOES

GIFT TO A DEAD DOCTOR

For big cash and prizes, the White House says 'just one minute.' The etymology is the reason speculation would deny incomprehension. A former nobody discussing hyperpolarized refined sugar said practical solutions disturbed the statistics. "There's no point in exposing kids to ignorance." It's not clear if the defrocked soldiers would be considered a free gift to a deceased New Zealand physician.

--Improvised word collage from random newspapers

THE ADVENTURES OF SILVER-HAIRED PLASMA

Cassette Cover

Steel Imp of Purpose

Soon the aspects of inter-cerebral dynamism will reroute the plants. Inwardly a doppelganger, outwardly a flying bicycle yearning for the moon's secret limbic in the dread goblet of panting noumena sorcerers. The birth mark of unheard squeaks in the ambient crystal butterfly, as in, turn the radio down with your foot. The diatomatious circle of wolves, sleep cone society vortex hog. Wrecked pace of humid goats. I am all that, and her lingering breath, too. There's not a spider without a faraday, my heated steel imp of purpose.

Interpretive Images

Karl Marx Werewolf, Benjamin Peret Batman, Beelzebub and Friends in a Subway Tunnel




In the Night Forest




Airplane Ride

Qkcofse: Molecular Detournement Egregore

My album Molecular Detournement Egregore has been released on the suRRism-Phonoethics netlabel and the Free Music Archive. M.D.E. features improvised, ambient and harsh noise tracks constructed from processed recordings, electronics, prepared guitar, voice, box flute, found sounds and amplified objects. The suRRism-Phonoethics and Free Music Archives links have been added to the sidebar. Many thanks to Jaan Patterson. Click on the title or copy/paste the links below.

http://surrism.phonoethics.com/surrism-phonoethics_qkcofse_m.d.e_spe_0043.html


http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Qkcofse

Moby Dick Jr. on behalf of the Ancient Ocean

Photo provided by Paloma Werner (see link for story)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100721/od_yblog_upshot/beware-of-jumping-whales-when-sailing-off-the-coast-of-south-africa

Tales of the Tongue

My tongue bounces into secret rivers with a quartz laugh overthrowing phantasmic doppler hyenas. Vowel sounds of unearthed roots merge with the toes of disgust to produce realms where the dance lives in sweet waves of sparks that drench me in time travel boats lashed to moon habitats where blood's theater pulsates into oblivion's heavy eyelids which close around the invisible world of microscopic cosmos.

Human meat slaves of boredom lock up the granite dust vipers to the peril of glass slipper roots pouring from the shoulders of iron mice. The second act of creation destroys the first as easily as a hand grasps the dark tombs of disquiet. Temptation's morphic swings heave in a sandstorm of cubes. Meteor showers ignite plasmic dust and take flight across the plains of wow.

My nose is a dream's kiss which jumps into the midst of thickening pods of sound which caress my ambiguous flame on your lava bed of goat skates. The walls open for me to find my way to your long fingers, where the stellar heights arc through doors of sidereal approximations. Sonic grasses of mountains bend in the wind's hollow hat in perplexing visions of ghost robes.

Scary Neptune Players

On the grim threshold of humor I deploy the subterfuge flowers in blue flame, waving echoes of sonar to enhance the gill-breathing ones, the scary Neptune players of interstellar babies.

Translucent Quickness

Hydrolith Chance Poems

Uftulata driving intoxicated cosmopolitan anomaly, giving rise to feel port of volume 34...believers can be seen of his snakes, to another light, to respond with a basic understanding.

Steam in the hair moved when oh foam terra will soon swing the contemplation that she hid in a hurry if not synchronic aegis by her locks.

That range, to this point, freeing up a dubious connection to which the half eaten layers black in the hands and the ego density their thesis...

The Aquatic Libertine

Dear Unknown letters part one

Dear Unknown,

The letters you sent were carved from stone fish eyes in some inexplicable submarine galley and I've eight minutes to read the hour. This is why I could walk through walls on the way to the neck of that star in your breath. Humor that you'll ever volcano walk, slowly footstep the drinks, and my nights float in a polarity of obelisk cats.

HYDROLITH

The international surrealist book Hydrolith, which I was one of the six editors for, has been released by Oyster Moon Press via lulu.com and is available at a discount for two months. There's also a free pdf at the lulu site. Click on the title above or copy/paste the link below:
http://tinyurl.com/hydrolith