field notes

 
field notes

Fifteen years

Fifteen years

For about fifteen years of my life, sometime during the late 1980s and 1990s, I "stopped listening to music" and became a non-listener. For me this does not mean that I stopped hearing music, but rather that I stopped listening to it: that is, hearing it with intent. Of course, it is impossible to avoid hearing music for all this time; I will insist only that I did not deliberately seek it out. Even though I had been an avid record collector before, I did not buy any new records, I went to few musical events (and when I did, it was mainly to be with friends). I listened to the radio, but only for the news and some interview programs. But as an active chooser of what music to listen to and when, I ceased to participate, and only came back gradually when my environment changed.

Why? The question seems misplaced to me. It just happened. I lost interest in music as a passtime, as something to do in the intervening hours between more purposeful activities. I did not want to discount or negate the importance of music, nor undertake some strange monastic discipline, nor to make any kind of statement. It was not even a conscious decision. It happenened only because my relationship with recorded music changed, fundamentally and irrevocably. It happened slowly at first, but then eventually with conviction and finality. I set music listening aside gently, with no righteous feeling, with neither remorse nor a feeling of triumph.

I began making sound art in the late 1980s, and it meant that I started to hear nearly everything, including music, in an entirely different way. Searching for source material, finding inspiration in odd places, combinations of sound that caught the ear, humorous or dramatic effects that simply developed out of the randomness of the timestream I was in. Some unusual or emphatic phrasing or combination of words in a news program or an advertisement might trigger the feeling that a latent meaning might be developed from it through its use in one of my own compositions, compositions which I was not then willing to describe as “music”. I was treating the reality of sound as I lived it as source material, physicalized through recordings, and manipulated on my workbench. Sound for me was tape, and tape was “time material” that I could cut, alter, and otherwise re-form to suit my taste. I did not need for it to be “music” in order to enjoy the gifts that music bestows.

My listening interests changed. My listening needs changed. It can be said that it was during this time that I learned how to listen. That means I was hearing new things in familiar settings, because, before this, I was not listening in the same way. I learned to bring sound to the center of my attention and examine it as closely as my perceptions permitted. The epiphany for me (I am certainly not alone in this) was that I was no longer a passive consumer of sound, but instead an active maker of new sounds. I tried to develop a seriousness about it, and I tried to understand its effects on me and on others.

Then, as I said, my environment changed. I found myself living in a new city and so I developed new tastes and new habits. I met new people and came across their interesting projects. I became interested in field recording and sound art and that is still where I am today. I began to listen to music again, to pore over playlists, to read reviews. To participate in the local scene (in my own limited way). It had become necessary once again.

This essay was first published in Czech as Patnáct let neposluchačem on 10 April, 2020 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Diyarbakır and the Dengbêj house

Diyarbakır and the Dengbêj house

Men sell sheep in a parking lot. They ask not to be photographed,
but allow us to take pictures of the animals.

We explore the neighborhoods of the Sur, the old walled city of Diyarbakır, and find a labyrinth of narrow channels within walls of dark basalt, perforated here and there with windows and doorways, leading to unknowable courtyards and the inner sancta of domestic life. A hot sky hovers above us, casting a torrent of blinding sunlight into the narrows, brilliant shafts jabbing like solid objects, painting geometric spots on the ground. The July temperatures go beyond 40°C, and the smallest patch of shade is a gratefully accepted mercy.

The channels split and fork in seeming infinitude, and the wider ones, by twists and turns, soon become narrow capillaries. The streets are cobbled with irregular stones, and earthen patches where the stones are gone, and for some stretches can seem almost deserted, save for the floating voices of the invisible people behind the walls, which slip and smear across the three hard surfaces, like flying birds or skittering lizards. Through the open windows and doorways, we hear conversations: mothers coax incalcitrant children, stern husbands scold bickering wives, children tussle for a favored toy, old men natter about the state of the world.

As our eyes get used to these unfamiliar spaces, as well as the mysteries of local social interactions, and as we habituate ourselves to the many turns and intersections in the streets, we begin to pick out details which seem characteristic. Here an old sign shows that someone who lived here had once been on the hajj; there the remnant of a decoration cut into stone now eroded, its meaning forgotten. The capital of an ancient marble column is here doing service as stool, or there turned on its side as a doorstep; a fragment of terra cotta decoration from a mosque has been used to patch a hole in the wall.

We round corners and find people: standing, walking, shopping, talking. There are things going on in the street, things which go on in probably every street in the world. Noisy groups of boys scratch out places to play games in the dirt, or scream through the narrows, chasing one another with sticks. Women lead bright-eyed children by the hand with their heavy shopping bags. Old men sit on stoops, giving instructions or advice to younger men as to what needs doing and how to do it. Women and girls sit around large bowls, peeling vegetables or sorting beans, while other men sit together, smoking, thinking. Watching. Wagons and pushcarts pass; a fruit vendor burdened with melons calls out offerings, a woman comes out from within to choose from among his stock. Stray cats are everywhere, unafraid, and they eagerly come to you if you beckon.

Diyarbakır and the Dengbêj house

Eyes follows us cautiously, curiously. Interactions with people, when not indifferent, are friendly and hospitable. My friend stops to take a picture through the open shop window of the workers in a bakery preparing the day’s bread. They seem delighted at the attention. Before we are allowed to leave we’re handed a fresh warm loaf — no charge.

One of the mosques has just called its faithful, men and boys come to sit on stone stools at a circle of water taps. They are taking off their shoes, washing behind their ears, their necks, hands, and feet, between every toe, the ritual ablutions before entering the space of worship. Some are already going into the inner sanctum; it is dusk and the somber bluish outdoor light is pierced by a honey-colored light coming from within. These wandering bees come home to the sweetness of welcome, and, if only for a brief moment, are connected as one to a thing greater than themselves. Even if one is not religious, this feeling is powerful enough by itself.

We emerge onto a main thoroughfare, the Gazi Caddesi, which cuts straight through the Sur. People are flowing in opposing and chaotic droves on the pavements, inspecting what is laid out before them, fruits and melons of various sorts, mass-produced shoes and cheap toys, kitchen utensils, tea and coffee sets, beckoning the shoppers to make a choice. Boys sell ears of boiled sweet corn or dip ice cream from steel tubs. We stumble upon the grand entrance of a restored caravanserai, the Tarihi Hasan Paşa Hanı, which has been converted into a public space full of shops, tea houses, and restaurants. We pause to admire a collection of antiques in the window of small boutique, and are soon greeted by a youngish man, smiling broadly, who pops out of the door to lend his assistance. Soon, he invites us into the shop, and the conversation quickly becomes less mercantile, more personal. We ask him, does he know of a place where we can hear local music? He enthusiastically responds with the suggestion that we go to the Dengbêj House, established to showcase the Kurdish Dengbêj tradition, a form of folk music as well as oral literature chronicling the life of the Kurdish people from their past up to current events.

We are fortunate; a performance is taking place when we arrive. We quietly open a large wooden door behind which we can hear a strong, clear voice singing in the a capella style of the Dengbêj, and emerge into a room with seating along all four walls, and little tables scattered about. We are greeted with smiles of welcome from everyone, and the main singer beckons me to come forward, to sit beside him, at the head of the room, next to the three singers who will take turns regaling the assembly with their skills. I take my place next to him, another man with a tray sets a glass of tea before me, and I press the record button.

Diyarbakır and the Dengbêj house
Recording of a performance at the Dengbêj House in Diyarbakır.
Photo by Tamás Sajó.

This essay was first published in Czech as Diyarbakır a Dengbêjský dům on 12 December, 2019 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Notes from Yunnan

Notes from Yunnan

Bai music at a temple in Baofeng (宝丰)

The village of Baofeng sits mainly on one side of a jade-green rushing river, and we enter the town via a grand modern bridge, across which an old man is leading a herd of cows. The traditional old district rises up the western slope above the river, a warren of narrow, but tidy streets and closely set houses. Many of the doorways are adorned with red silk and paper lanterns, their frames are pasted over with Chinese inscriptions printed on colorful paper.

On a hilltop overlooking the town, there sits a temple complex. We arrive there to find it full of activity, a fitting closure to the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations. Outside the temple, we can already hear pentatonic strains of music coming from an inner courtyard. As our curiosity draws us in, we are greeted shyly, but with many welcoming smiles, by people sitting around fires and preparing their noon meals. The inner courtyard is smoky from the temple fires, and spectators sit around on a low stone bench under a shady tree, listening to a group of local Bai musicians and singers.

Notes from Yunnan
Musicians at a temple in Baofeng

Shaxi (沙溪) morning ambience

The town of Shaxi boasts an 8th-century arch bridge at its eastern gate over which very likely passed the Venetian explorer Marco Polo. In the recesses of it narrow streets, we find a worker shoveling refuse into the back of a truck. As in every town and city we visited, the garbage collectors make their rounds early in the morning, driving trucks that blare out amplified music to alert the neighborhood that is is time to bring out their trash. I record the ambience as I walk past. Near the end of the recording, a horse-drawn cart passes by, the canter of the beast setting off a shower of tiny bell sounds, an endemic feature of the local soundscape.

Notes from Yunnan
Old Shaxi

Tibetan Roman Catholics in Cizhong (茨中)

From Deqin, we drive through steep valleys to the town of Cizhong, lying in a part of Yunnan that is historically Tibetan. There has been no rain, and the dry painted soil, variously colored of rust, ochre, ash or chalk, is whipped up along the roadside into dervishes of dust as we pass.

Nonetheless, the lowland fields are green and productive. Crop rows are crowded with lettuce and various other greens, local vegetables I have no names for. Farm animals feast on yellow straw or dried cornstalks, fattening themselves for the table. Chickens and ducks run freely, protesting loudly when a passing vehicle honks its way through. Listless dogs sleep on doorsteps, and barely trouble themselves to notice the passing strangers.

The Tibetan community of Cizhong is mainly Roman Catholic, the result of French missionary activity during the 19th century. On Sunday morning, some one hundred people, elders, young parents, and swarms of raucous children, gather in the town church, which is surrounded by grape vineyards and vegetable patches, to sing Catholic scripture in the form of Buddhist sutras.

Here, my traveling companion writes in greater detail about Cizhong and its Tibetan Catholic community.

Notes from Yunnan
The Tibetan Roman Catholic church in Cizhong

Naxi musicians in Baisha (白沙)

We leave the city of Lijiang behind, still packed with New Years’ revelers, renting bicycles to take in a bit of the countryside before staging an exploration of the village of Baisha, a few kilometers to the north. The scene through which we pass is surrounded by fields and a dramatic backdrop of mountains. Arriving there, we find a band of Naxi musicians playing traditional music in an open shelter next to the street. The group members smile graciously as I slip some banknotes into the donation plate.

Notes from Yunnan
Musicians playing in Baisha

A temple in Yunnanyi (云南驿)

Yunnanyi is a historic village on the Tea Horse Road, not yet developed for tourism. Saturday morning is market day, and the dusty streets are lined with sellers of meat, vegetables, and fish. We gradually wander up to a temple on a hilltop, festooned with colorful flags, and crowded with people sitting around cooking, chatting, and making their devotions. I enter a room in the temple complex when I hear singing and begin to record.

Notes from Yunnan
Singer at a temple in Yunnanyi

This essay was first published in Czech as Yunnan on 14 March, 2017 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Light and snow

Light and snow

It is a cold day, and the milky light of the short afternoon gives the outdoor air a numbing hardness, like a plate of glass, which could shatter at any instant, exploding into a dense mist of tiny crystals. A cloud of nubiform vapor rises above a building, illuminated from behind by the low-hanging sun, so that it glows like a fluorescent tube, as if lit by its own internal sun. My shoes make quiet creaks as I step across the frozen pavement. The crows call to each other, as if to ask, “Isn’t it cold today?” and then answer “My, yes, isn’t it!”

Each breath is a pointed reminder of the frigid air as it is repeatedly drawn deeply into the body, stinging the trachea, stirring the senses. The sharp blue sky is flecked with clouds only on the horizon, though the wind is now carrying them toward me. For the moment, however, the sunlight is glassy like the clearest of lenses and the edges of things seem almost to sparkle, a vitreous scene staged in the proscenium of a great sphere. The shadows and hard lines at the edges of things are more focused, more definite than usual, and brilliant.

The human eye is like a piece of glass. It glints in the hard light of its glances, it shines like a star. It shrinks in the dazzle of this cold light, stopping down like a camera, giving vision an intense depth of focus. Everything seems sharp and brittle. An empty plastic cup makes a hollow, skittering sound as a breeze pushes it in stages across the rough asphalt of the empty street.

Soon, the sun is raining down on the river water through slots in the clouds. In the cold light the fingers of light hang like glimmering icicles soon to touch the water beneath.

It is snowing. Now calm and anechoic, the layers of soft, airy flakes dampen reverberance, robbing every sound of its richness and throat, the impression they project of solidity, of being the voice of a solid object. Speaking, walking, the rustle of clothing as I move, and the flat honesty of it all reflects the direct passage of vibrating things through the gentle air to the ear, without the additions that they would acquire on their movement through a more resonant environment.

I am passing through a rushing cloud of snowflakes as a raging blizzard pushes across my path and swallows me. The flying crystals kiss my cheeks at first, and then bite softly as the cold intensifies. I am dissolving in the cold, the heat from my face and ungloved hands dissipates in the swirling winds, my skin turning into dead leather. The surrounding landscape is drained of depth and color, and I seem to be walking through a foggy 19th-century photograph, a displaced daguerreotype on display in a snow globe. The naked trees reach up like strokes of faded ink and the wind struggles to uproot them, to make them fly like the crows who circle the chimneys and and swing around the rooftop antennas in hectic, whirling orbits.

One of my earliest memories is of snow. In a lull between blasts from a winter hurricane I went outside to find my familiar outdoor world transformed. In the wan light and the absence of a visible sun, the puffy air had the dullness of the inside of a pillow. The hush of a church or library had descended as the blizzard subsided. The surrounding air became a blanket of comparative warmth, and the sounds of the farm animals, the passing of a faraway freight train, the barking dogs, and clattering of frozen tree leaves were muffled by the airborne moisture. In the haze, none of these sounds had visible source, and no compass direction. Each of them seemed to be coming from everywhere.

This essay was first published in Czech as Světlo a sníh on 27 January, 2017 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Adrift

Adrift

The city opens up, somewhat like a book, by the simple act of walking through it. The rhythmic movement of walking accords with the swing of a turning page, dividing movement through space and narrative with an insistent rhythm. Our gaze, and our other senses, detect our changing location and orientation in relation to our surroundings, and we struggle to decipher the urban space, creating meanings. A city is a library, its blocks are volumes, perhaps, its buildings chapters, its shops, offices, and domiciles paragraphs, and the collective story they tell is in the objects that have accumulated there, the architectural encrustations that have congealed over the decades, and the people who dwell and have dwelt in them.

Can you smell the dusty confinement of attics, the chilly, vaguely menacing, breath of dank cellars, the damp and worm-eaten pages of long-stored books, the sour smell of a stack of old magazines that have not been able to stretch themselves open in a great while, like a cleansing yawn after a deep sleep?

The exotic promise of a passageway, half-hidden behind a partly closed door, or a small unnamed square where peculiar streets come together at jarring angles, break the linear trace of our usually somnambulistic meanderings (the path we take may be aimless and even loop back on itself, but time always passes from A to Z). These digressions accumulate, forming little incidents of their own, like sidebars, footnotes, emphatic subheadings, and other structural or expressive contrivances, like italics, or boldface type. Those who can read the various markings of the city well, are able to penetrate its many layers, and experience it, not only in normal three-dimensional space, but also as superimposed variants of itself, like holograms, showing facets of the city’s various conditions in time, like the accumulated layers in a palimpsest.

If, by chance, we find ourselves hurrying down a street on a drizzly autumn afternoon, treading upon the fallen yellow leaves matted on the wet pavement, we note that they emit a tea-like fragrance when their natural tannins mix with the rainwater. We may suddenly come before a prominent opening, a caesura among the unbroken stanza of building façades, overhung by a neon sign that announces the name of a passage. Or perhaps it is one of the numerous “mouse holes” that are unmarked, and mostly unnoticed by any except those who use them as shortcuts from place to place. And, if we obey our urge to drift, to sway from the urgency of our present errands, we may wander into this appendix and lose ourselves, if only for a short while, within the warren of its various converging passages.

We pass into an transitional space, neither inside nor out, and our hearing is intensified as we move from an acoustically “dry” exterior environment, and dive into a well of “wet” reflective surfaces that echo every shoe’s heel strike on the hard floor, and the voice of every conversation. It is an aquarium of ringing corridors, hemmed in by glass shop windows, hard stone, and the comparative closeness of the spaces, sometimes empty, sometimes buzzing with people. The traffic is on foot, the sound and smell of motors and tires on cobblestones recedes, the soft shriek of the tramline is far away. This sheltered imperium, this cloistered byway is like a core sample of the city. It is here in these passages that we feel the city opening its mysteries to us.

Outside, street corners hide small revelations, like the unexpected discovery of the murderer’s identity on turning the page in a detective thriller. Thoroughfares, boulevards, and avenues are expositions of modes of life, glassy and superficial, often their shouting advertisements only barely hide a thin, flaking veneer through the chinks of which can be glimpsed evidence of a past; alluring, mysterious, rich and suggestive. We work to assemble an idea of the past from these peeling layers and tantalizing fragments, filling the empty spaces with our imagination.

This essay was first published in Czech as Bezcílně on 16 November, 2016 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Eastward bound

Eastward bound

The late summer train leaves Prague, heading east, crowded with students, tourists, grannies. Past the city outskirts, I settle into the sensations of the train ride, the motion and the collective sound of small mechanical train parts that tick, rattle and ring, a thousand little springs and bells going all at once. A kind of boredom sets in, mostly the annoyance of too many loud voices of my fellow passengers, noises which unmoor coherent thought and hamper useful daydreaming. The young woman seated across from me receives an unending series of instant messages, usually with a tight smile pressed on her lips, sometimes splitting into a poorly suppressed fit of momentary laughter at her interlocutor’s apparent wit.

The clouds are dark and heavy on the left side of the rails, while on the right, it is clear and sunny. We ride along a chance cleft in the weather, a storm front moving in perpendicular to our path, and I have he feeling of experiencing two distinct days at once; a contrasting one for each brain hemisphere. Then, we pass through a managed forest of regularly-spaced pines, and the light of the low-hanging sun strobes through the train car unpleasantly, a visual vibration jarringly out of sync with the soothing lullabye of the train. I close my eyes, but my eyelids only filter the pulsing light with the reddish tint of blood and flesh. The shifting intensities trigger a mild synesthesia, and in the center of my head, I can almost hear a series of surging whooshes, like my own pulsing blood at triple speed.

We are not just travelers from place to place, we are also travelers through realms of light. As the day progresses in steady motion, the reality of my experience of is modulated by changes in ambient light that come into the train car from the outside.

In Budapest, I change to a bus. Passing through flat lands, the sun’s rays skim the tops of every grass blade, touching each with silver, a gauzy scrim spread out over pasture and field. Fingers of this light cut through gaps in the scattered trees, seeming to clutch at them as if to pull them out by the roots, but instead merely dappling the deep shade beneath with bright, dancing spots. Sometimes, a lone falcon sits on a fencepost like a mute sentinel, taking note of our passing. As my eye is carried far out onto the horizon, the solidity of the hills melts gradually into soft blue forms that seem false, like stage cutouts, and separated from the sky by a slight darkness of a matching hue. Strips of tilled earth alternate with shining webs of vine-draped fences and the drooping black lines of the electrical network. I see a green region, then a blue-green one, and then further on, one that is blue. As the land recedes from view, the farther places become bluer. The air itself, like the sky, is blue.

We reach the Ukrainian border just as evening is falling, there is a long line of vehicles waiting to pass customs. It is clear this will take some time. We are let off the bus, and I try to see to the end of the line. There is tension in the air as the many travellers have had to give up momentarily the free sensation of movement with a sudden halt to confront the bureaucracy and armed guards of the border control. As I step out, a huge cloud of crows flies overhead. From the narrow channels between the parked trucks and buses where I am standing, I see it pass as a black veil, crackling with flapping wings and anxious caws.

I stop for the night in a hotel near some train tracks in Ternopiľ, the eastern extreme of my journey. Floating in through the open window, along with the night air, is the sound of every train, coming and going, the song of rolling metal and churning gasses. I can also hear the sounds of the platform announcements, reverberating through the distance until their substance is lost in the waves of echo that they stir up, seeming to say, “your journey is not over, not yet.”

This essay was first published in Czech as Na východ on 14 September, 2016 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Databending

Databending

Matter, as commonly understood, can exist as a solid, a liquid or a gas, and in turn these states can be characterized directly and simply: a solid has a fixed shape and volume; a liquid has fixed volume but is amorphous, taking the shape of its container; while a gas has neither fixed shape nor volume. In contrast, the common artifact of our age, the digital file, has no volume at all, and has no discernible form, as it consists solely of superimposed magnetic charges on sensitized substances. These artifacts are literally immaterial. We cannot examine them directly.

Indirectly, we can inspect them in complete detail, if we choose. Structurally, each atomic bit in a file symbolizes either a zero or a one. In turn, clusters of bits may symbolize higher number values, which in turn may represent letters of the alphabet, the hue and intensity of a pixel of an image, or the amplitude value of a tiny portion of a sound wave. These are just three examples, there are indeed any number of other possibilities.

The collections of values in a file lie dormant on our disk drives until some program is invoked upon them, breathing life into abstract models and symbolic references. At least that’s how it works if we have a program that “understands” the file and can interpret it for us. But computer files by themselves are essentially ambiguous, because what they represent is completely dependent on the interpreter that mediates between our senses and the numbers they contain. This may seem a bit surprising, because we have become used to dealing with digital objects as if they were real things in space. We “move” them around and place them “inside” folders through the agency of a symbolic UI (user interface) that represents the immaterial digital file as something we can “select” and “open” and “see” or “hear”. All major computer operating systems in use today encourage this illusion. It remains a fact however, that without the right interpreter, a digital file is by itself a meaningless blob of numbers.

With a process called databending we enter a strange realm where the apparent solidity of digital artifacts is revealed as fungible and without inherent perceivable form. Through databending, the meanings of digital artifacts are transmogrified as if by alchemy, shedding their moorings to conventional interpretations, forcing the perceiver to explore variant ways of understanding them. It is a reinterpretation of what the “meaning” of “data” is, and an adisciplinary practice that forces informatics and esthetics to intersect, offering a distinct alternative to conventional attitudes of design.

Databending shouts down the assertion that a set of numbers that constitutes a digital file has a clear meaning by ignoring its received and carefully engineered structure, and scattering its bits across a field that is unstable, unreliable, and unpredictable. The glitch -- the visible or audible result of damaged or missing data -- becomes a moment of esthetic contemplation.

Databending is typically practiced by opening a file in the “wrong” program and studying the results. For example, a databender might open a sound file in an image editor or a photograph in a sound editor. In this way, a photograph may be heard, or a sound file may be transformed into an image. Chaos reigns in these new artifacts; in many cases the computer may even refuse to display them.

Databending leaves us with visual or audible noise, but it can give us with a deeper understanding of how digital representations are structured. With sensitive observation, a databenders can coax out of the chaos new images and sounds that are rich and expressive, and which can be produced in no other way.

Computer code is a set of symbolic instructions. It is text that does work. Unlike text that sits on the page and awaits a reader, code acts in space and time and makes changes to the things of the universe in ways both great and small. Because these codes and data are the key ways for representing culture going forward, we risk abandoning their potential for poetry if we ignore what’s going on inside. And it’s been left to the artist and musician to chip at the edges of this new digital “material” to find new uses for it.

To start exploring databending on your own, try these keywords in your favorite search engine: ‘databending’, ‘glitch’, ‘Rosa Menkman’.

This essay was first published in Czech as Databending on 27 July, 2016 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

On recording

On recording

I keep a prism on my windowsill, carefully positioned to catch a sun beam, forcing it to disgorge its hidden colors. The prism has the telling shape of a wedge, as if broadly hinting at its purpose, that of splitting light rather than logs. As the sun makes its daily round, sweeping the sky like the hand of a clock, the wandering rainbow paints a patch of wall, or any random object that it touches. A bright and richly colored thread connected with purity and eternity, it talks of the qualities of beauty, simplicity, and truth. These are the same qualities, I suppose, that animate the inquisitive spirit, be it scientific or artistic.

Photography, already a rather old medium, has evolved a set of conventions to deal with the ambiguities that arise in using a highly technical-scientific means for artistic practice. Does truth come first or beauty? In what sense is a photograph true, and in what sense is it personal and selective and hence entirely subjective? The answer is that both are always true to varying degrees.

A photograph is a true document only in the sense that certain photons were reflected from some object at some point in time, and these photons passed through space until they struck some light-sensitive material, and were thus recorded. Literally everything else, strictly speaking, about any photograph is subjective. A person chooses the subject, the framing, perhaps the choice of lens and camera settings, and positions himself in relation to the object to achieve some desired effect. Additionally, if you consider Photoshop, which you must in this day and age, then every so-called photographic image must be considered to be nothing more, neither more nor less honest, than a digital painting. So, perhaps surprisingly, it turns out that the truth of a photograph, the fact of certain photons captured by silver or silicon, is essentially its most trivial component, and relatively uninteresting.

Many photographers view the camera as giving them a special way of seeing. “I take photographs to see what the world looks like in photographs,” said the photographer Gary Winogrand, affirming the primacy of the photographic image as a unique experience in itself, the equal of any work of art, and, most importantly, entirely separate and independent from what it represents.

We could ask many of these same questions about field recording (and no doubt I am not the first to do so).

Field recording can be a way of experiencing the world, a way of perceiving sounds that normally would be noticed only marginally, if at all. We might think of choosing what to record, that is to say, being aware that in the world there are many things worth the bother of recording them, as an exercise to sharpen the hearing, for it is useful to always pay attention to the surrounding sounds as a way of discovering interesting subjects. The activity itself can be revelatory, even if no recording is made, because we don’t normally actively listen to every sound around us that we passively hear. But an interest in making recordings inspires precisely the wish to listen closely to almost everything.

But, to paraphrase Winogrand, do we make field recordings to hear how the world sounds over loudspeakers? Can we contrast this with the practice of recording something to document it, to preserve it for repeated use? The role of these media is at least partly to stop time from passing (or at least transpose a passage of time to be heard or seen sometime later). But these artefacts also propel time forward, by the fact that perceiving recorded reality is a distinct and new experience, and separate from experiencing it in the first instance.

So I don’t really want an answer to any of these questions. I just want to suggest that any answer that might be given will likely be always partly, and at the same time never entirely, true.

This essay was first published in Czech as O nahrávání on 8 June, 2016 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Strange signals

Strange signals

We are all in motion all of the time, for when we are not, we are dead and not reading these words. We are in motion simply because we live, and blood ebbs and flows in our veins, like waves in the sea, and electricity ripples through our nerves, like tiny bolts of lightning. We are in motion because we can walk, most of us, and when we walk, we are seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting and feeling, and the effort of walking quickens our blood, and the electricity that leaps across our synapses. We are dynamic beings in the thrall of these rhythms, while our heartbeats mark time, and the regular ins and outs of our breathing do, too, making an ensemble music of muscular pumps. But most important, probably, is the fact that we take meaning, or make meaning, from the matter and detail of much of that passes around us, and because of this, we are always changing.

We are always changing because the outside changes us on the inside. We make meaning when we see or hear a new thing, and this new thing may change how we perceive every old thing already known to us. The new thing, once encountered, is put in some obscure mental place, and when we encounter it again, we know we already have a model of it on a shelf in our brain somewhere. Memories from the past always feed back into perception in the present. And then the past forms consonances or dissonances with the present, which may strengthen stored perceptions, or it may alter, weaken, or break them down.

Once, I was riding in a car along the shore of a lake. It was a clear winter day, of the sort that brings a sun so bright that, at first, the eyes disobey and simply do not see. The opposite shore was mountainous, and the white snow lying in the sunlight brought a stabbing pain, one that persisted, momentarily, even behind closed eyelids. The afterimage of this white surface left a hazy veil over the scene when the eyes were opened again. The surface of the lake was calm and softly rippled and, in the glare of an empty sky badged with a burning vortex of light, a few gray clouds began to gather on the horizon, and the surface of the water looked like brushed aluminium.

Further down the road, I slowly became aware of the sound of a radio. I thought maybe the car radio had been left on with the volume very low. But when I looked down at the dashboard, I could see that the display panel of the radio was dark. I tried the switch, and verified that the radio was off. The sound I was hearing seemed like a man’s voice, barely audible above the sound of gentle static, but with the rapid syllables of a radio announcer.

I asked my friend, who was driving, if he could hear it. He paused, listening, and agreed that he thought so, but was no surer about it than I was. I happened to look across the lake and I could see a line of radio or electrical towers on the other side. The sound we were hearing was so faint that it seemed possible that we simply imagined that we were hearing it. Perhaps it was a pareidolia effect, our brains trying to find order in the rushing white noise of the road, air moving past the car, and the rumble of rubber on asphalt, like seeing the shapes of animals in the clouds. But, as we put more distance between ourselves and the towers, the sound disappeared.

Turning recently to the internet, I made a few searches. It took a half-dozen tries to find a useful search query, but soon I was reading accounts of people picking up radio transmissions through their dental fillings. Others left comments about “hearing voices,” that suggested that they may be schizophrenics in need of treatment. At the same time, there appeared to be a name for a phenomenon at least superficially similar to what we experienced, called electrophonic hearing. Then, a radar technician elaborated on the sensation that some people have of hearing radar. It seems that direct electromagnetic stimulation of the human ear is possible, and even the deaf can hear these sounds.

I still have no idea if what I experenced was related to one of these things, or simply the subconscious yearning of our brains to find order in the chaos, to find the hidden meaning of things. But both instances are fairly interesting to consider.

This essay was first published in Czech as Zvláštní signály on 11 May, 2016 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Yerevan

Yerevan

Yerevan, like cities elsewhere in the world, has a pattern to its days, rising and falling, tension and release, doldrums and dramatic peaks, a natural drama unfolding with the cycles of the earth. At midnight, people are still on the streets, going out for amusement, coming home late from work, but these motions gradually subside as the night deepens. Hours later, there is what we call the dead of night, a few taxis trawl the lonely streets on mysterious errands, but the quiet of darkness is in command, and most of the city’s lively motions have shrunk back into slumber, a retractive phase needed to gather up and strengthen the energies that will be expended later. In the pre-dawn, animals are the first to awaken. Dogs bark, and the incipient anxieties to which they cry out rallies other anxious dogs, gradually rippling out from various centers, and joining finally into an ambience where the sound of dogs comes from all directions. Crows call, restlessly moving from perch to perch, and flocks of them sweep the sky as its western edge slowly lightens, revealing the horizon. The tension mounts with excruciating patience, seeming to languish always at each stage, concealing the true force of its continuous movement, as the sun comes up. When the sky gradually brightens enough, people leave their homes to go to work or school, and the arrogance of cars and trucks overtakes the abashed sounds of nature. During much of the daylight time, this is what is heard all around.

I get up, too, and go out to explore, observe and absorb. When I reach the city center, I find that in the ancient city of Yerevan the streets do not generally coil and narrow into disorienting networks as the streets do in other cities of a similar age. In the 1930s, under the influence of a raging fever for modernization, the city planners of Yerevan destroyed the (I presume) more authentic old city center, and replaced it with a grid of avenues, fitted rationally within a geometrically perfect arc that grows eastward from the ravine of the river Hrazdan. Precious few hints of the old city remain, the elaborations of the ages apparently having been pushed aside with complete indifference. I find in their place the broad boulevards of some Armenian Hausmann, with wide foot pavements lined with stone facades in the Stalinist baroque style, the remnants of a Soviet world that lives on even in later buildings that went up after 1989.

By late afternoon, people emerge from their daytime roosts, and are on the streets again, many of them with shopping bags from the market, or briefcases, or book bags. I suppose many of them are on their way home to have dinner with their families. I also suppose many of them are going home alone, to a private sanctuary where they can uncoil from the tensions of the day. I am watching their faces and postures, trying surreptitiously to capture a sense of who, collectively, the city of Yerevan is; trying to divine, with little hope, a summary quality of the city’s character, and some sense of what makes Yerevan distinctive from all the other cities of the earth. I do not wish to make some grand pronouncement, or declaration of a mythical truth, but rather to make something for me, a souvenir if you will, that I can take with me when I inevitably leave. Visits are always temporary, travel is is a chain of transitions from place to place. I want something to hang on to from these experiences.

I make these images, and I will study them later, and in them, I hope to understand the chaotic experiences of the moment, and distill these confused essences into a richer form of memory.

This essay was first published in Czech as Jerevan on 9 March, 2016 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

No train of thought

No train of thought

What do I think of what my eyes see and my ears hear, especially in anticipation of making a recording? Words can only partly describe what and how we perceive. The descriptions are riddled with holes. Details that are challenging to describe are often left as openings for the reader to fill in. Recordings also reveal important omissions, but of an entirely different kind. Machines have limited perspective and flexibility; they can mimic but not entirely replace human tissue.

A camera makes an image from a single perspective, and what is beyond the frame is left out. The lens gives the image an angle of view and a depth of field, each of which also efface, enhance or omit. In movies, the duration of the shot, as well as movement of the camera, become important. A sequence of frames is not a fragment ripped from reality, it is only a token, like a phantom standing in for something solid. There are similar issues in sound recording. A microphone may range from omnidirectional to highly directional, and various designs and electronic systems produce different effects of proximity, isolation or accuracy. During reproduction, a feeling of presence is highly prized, but is usually lacking in all but the highest quality recordings and reproductions.

It is common practice in movies to edit multiple points of view together into an apparently seamless whole. However, this does not actually fill gaps of perception, but rather exploits them to create the effect of the passing of time, which lacks the structure of a certain number of discrete frames per second. Time does not proceed in fits and starts like movie frames, yet this contrivance presents a convincing illusion of time. Filmmakers have, over the course of 12 decades, evolved techniques that emphasize continuity. It is well understood how to hide blatant discontinuities between shots by matching eyelines, cutting on action, or similar conventions. Film cutting is generally invisible to audiences, at least until someone points it out.

Interestingly, what works in a linear time-based medium such as film, where juxtaposing two different images results in the impression of continuous time unfolding, doesn’t necessarily work as well in the medium of sound, where analogous juxtapositions are often used to explicity signal abrupt change, rather than mask it. Continuity in audio is better served by using such tricks as fades and overlapping sound, or a very careful kind of editing that matches waveforms.

There are always things these devices can register that we cannot. We can make these things visible and audible by manipulating them. Machines can help us reveal a hidden truth. Scientific detectors and music-making devices are both called ‘instruments.’ Choosing what to include and what to leave out is the primary creative act when using recording instruments to make art.

Let’s try to look at it from another angle. My eyes move freely on their lubricated gimbals. I can direct my vision to one thing, but normally, my eyes move swiftly from thing to thing, which my brain assembles into a coherent space. My ears can bring one sound among many to attention simply by will, and other sounds seem to fade away when I do so.

I can be sitting in my room, and maybe I hear someone walking up the stairs in the corridor. Then I might remember how, in an old place where I no longer live, I had always heard the woman who lived upstairs from me whenever she ascended or descended. Perception is full of layers, it dances with memory and mood and the tempos of the body. Suddenly, reality is out there floating before me. And it is also inside me projected onto an interior screen. It surrounds me, I surround it. I walk in the center of a sphere that floats along with me. Its inner surface beyond reach. It is outside me. I sit here inside myself, and I’m not even sure, at this moment, what I look like.

This essay was first published in Czech as Žádný tok myšlenek on 10 February, 2016 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Chiatura

Chiatura

We arrive in Chiatura following a sinuous road along a rich topographic contour that dances through the gorged and mounded land of Imereti, in western Georgia. On the outskirts of the city, we come to a ring of concrete panel buildings high above the settlement below, at the bottom of the steep walled valley of the river Qvirila. The local economy, since the 19th century, has been based on the mining of manganese, a substance essential to steel production. In 1905, some 60% of the world’s output of manganese came from the rich deposits that lie in these cliffs. Evidence of the scale of mining operations can be seen everywhere in the form of the rusting, clanking hulks of Chiatura’s industrial infrastructure, much of which is still in daily operation.

At the brink of the cliff, the city unfolds below us as a map, lying in a flat area that bends around the graceful parenthesis by which the Qvirila cleaves the landscape. A central rail yard acts as Chiatura’s beating heart, and long chains of ore cars lethargically rumble in and out, empty to be filled and full to be later emptied. A haze of directionless sound hangs over the cityscape, a resonant din, an acoustic fog of displaced energies. It is like a steely curtain, forged by wheels, rails, gears, struts, pistons, metal parts in a copious variety of forms rolling, grinding, scraping, singing, and shrieking, one against its other, and these against those further down the line.

Here and there, cables leap the gorge, joining the top of one cliff with the other one facing it, and from time to time, a great ore bucket the size of a truck floats into our peripheral vision as it crawls across the dazzling sky along a sagging dark line. The tremendous weight of these conveyances hangs on this rusty thread, high above the valley, a sword of Damocles at the edge of disaster. To deal with an accidental rain of falling rocks, a wire net also crosses the valley just beneath the cable for ore buckets, so that these lowly meteors do not randomly dent cars, shatter roof tiles, or kill the residents below.

When transport is in progress, the distant rattle and screech of the moving cables can be heard from all corners, the thrum of a great guitar. Over the hours of a day, it infests the mind, and days after we left Chiatura behind, I could summon the sound in memory with convincing precision. (I hear it even now, faintly, as I write this.)

In the morning, we go for a walk. We see a group of men in the center who have gathered at what might be an employment office. They are figures in dark clothing, and stand together in the way that packs of men arrange themselves all over the world, conversing, smoking, spitting, laughing half-sincerely at each other’s time-worn jokes. We visit a shop to buy bread and kefir for breakfast. As we come out, some of the men are eyeing us, not with hostility, but with an understandable curiosity in the face of strangers.

We wander south along the street named after Ilia Chavchavadze and come to a theatre named after the poet Akaki Tsereteli. The Georgian names have the pleasant ring of foreignness, and they spill from the lips with a rightness of form that gives them a kind of friendliness and dignity that is, at the same time, august, human, and intimate. In the conversations we overhear, dense clusters of consonants are frequently broken by ringing vowels, and a dramatic rolling intonation is typically used to frame emphatic phrasings.

But of course, we use Russian to communicate here since, as a mere visitor, I had not taken on the daunting task of really learning Georgian, beyond a few dozen key words and phrases. A street sweeper starts a conversation with us. We ask about the theatre, which boasts a brazen Stalinist-era slogan on its portico, and we ask a few questions about life in the town. Like all the conversations we have with locals, he swiftly turns to his own dissatisfaction at having to live in a place like this, summing it up succinctly: They pull millions worth of ore out of the mountains, but where does it all go? This town never sees anything for it.

We wander a little north of the town, and the built-up area gradually dwindles. We come to a monastery called Mgvimevi, from the 13th century, that sits high up above the valley floor. A steep stairway which, like many things here, is made of rusting welded metal, takes us up the escarpment. Looking back down, we can see an old woman in black carrying a shopping bag as she slowly trudges up after us. We make the ascent and find at the top a series of chapels of carved stone arranged around the entrance to a natural cave.

From the top of the steps, the metal walkway hangs like a balcony, giving us a view of the valley. We look to the southwest, and see the industrial end of town, with its mining machinery and concrete buildings, laid out before us. It appears as a vale of dystopia, an unsightly gash in the otherwise fecund and verdant countryside. Ugly, forbidding, yet fascinating in its complexity.

In the caves behind us, there is a basilica of stone, richly carved with traditional Georgian ornamentation, and inside of it, the smell of burning incense and beeswax candles. A few visitors to the church, mostly old women in black clothing, light candles, kneel and bow, and murmur quiet prayers before one of the church’s icons.

We admire the frescoes, defaced by invaders or the simple passing of time, but still colorful, with evocative faces appearing as if through a dark veil. We come across a pane of glass in the rock, low on the wall near our feet, covering a rectangular receptacle cut from the limestone. Looking inside, I descry pairs of hollow eyes glaring back at me in the dim light. It is the church reliquary, and here are deposited the bones of its former denizens.

The cables with which this valley is festooned carry not only ore, but also passengers, for a public transportation system was developed for the town that makes use of cable cars to get people out of and into the valley. The system was established in the 1950s, an effort to improve worker productivity by saving the miners time in getting from home to work and back. There are 17 passenger cable cars in Chiatura, and the ones still in service continue to run using the original equipment.

We step onto one of the frankly decrepit-looking cars that regularly takes people from below up to the residential areas up above. Seated inside the small hanging chamber are two old ladies with bags of shopping, and a small schoolgirl happily scribbling on a sheet of paper. The welded metal car sways and lightly bounces as the car adjusts to the addition of our weight. We wait a few minutes, smiling nervously at the other passengers, and the little girl beams at us once or twice, but carries on making her pictures. Finally, the cable car operator comes in and, lifting a retro-chic telephone receiver that looks like something from an old submarine, she presses one of its two black buttons. We can hear a jarring electrical buzz as she connects to the station above. There is a brief conversation, presumably to see why the wait is so long. Ah, she says after hanging up. They are having their lunch.

Because we are just joy-riding, which cable car we take is not important, and there are others to choose from. So we go around the station and get into a cable car going the opposite direction, a blue booth with nautical portholes. Inside the car, a few seconds of stillness, and then we are off to the clouds. The ascent is abrupt and swift enough to cause in the stomach little leaps of excitement. The cable makes ticking sounds in an irregular, accelerating cadence and, at length, it emits a plangent moan as we rise up like balloonists to the top of the cliff face. The booth, hanging from a single point of its roof, oscillates gently from right to left, like the rocking of a boat.

I make no recordings in Chiatura, only photographs. I am dumbstruck by the scale and spectacle of the place, its perverse scenery, its cable cars, nearly every view given over to the lethal logic of industrial exploitation. The pervasive grim clockwork of metallic sounds seems always somehow distant and ghostly, but persistent and inescapable, as if it is forever around the next corner, and unreachable.

This essay was first published in Czech as Chiatura on 9 December, 2015 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Osek monastery

Early one Saturday morning, I am wandering the gardens of the 12th-century monastery complex in Osek u Duchcova, in north Bohemia, near the German border.

Stepping outside, the humid morning air parts to embrace me with its chill. The greenery drips with a sopping dew, a gathered moisture also reflected above in the overcast sky. The leather of my shoes darkens with the accumulated wetness as my feet shuffle through the unkempt grass.

The bounty of autumn is everywhere in the orchard, the apple trees are heavy with uncollected fruit. I pluck several of them and find that there are not less than three varieties of apples growing here, tasting sometimes of honey, sometimes of wine, or even hinting of rose. But they are late apples, left too long on the tree, too dense and hard to eat.

Further showing to the fertility of this place and its abundance, a small flock of sheep grazes in a nearby field, but a wire fence keeps me from going any closer. They look up at me as I pass, but they don’t stop chewing, their breakfast being far more important to them than any passing stranger.

Osek monastery
Morning garden ambience, Osek Monastery

The gardens of the estate seem vast, but are hemmed in by walls that create an enclosure for the yards, the orchards, the pools, the workshops and the storage sheds. Some of these walls are made of raw stone knitted together in a chaotic matrix, characteristic of a certain style of wall building. Others are put together from orderly brick logically arranged in rectilinear expanses. The length of a stuccoed wall next to a highway (I know the road is there because I can hear the passing sound of the occasional solitary vehicle) is divided by a portal gate that leads out.

In the wan misty light of early morning, the sun appears as a fine white disc, still hanging low in the sky. In the enclosed space there are arranged, not only the convent and church and its formal courtyards, but also several ruins, and I find stone stairways disappearing into the grass, seldom-used walkways, and other baroque pieces rendered poignant by their now run-down elegance. I discover a small chapel and step inside. It’s a bit grimy, but generally in good condition. A statue of a bare-chested man, a martyr probably, stretches out his hand, offering me a skull.

I had arrived in Osek the previous afternoon with friends to take part in one of the events of the Frontiers of Solitude project, about transformations of the landscape and the close connections between post-industrial civilization and nature, elaborated in terms of cultural geography. Of particular interest to the project participants are the vast, scarifying open-pit lignite mining that takes place throughout the nearby region. In recent history, the region around Osek has stood as a symbol for environmental degradation and sweeping transformations of the landscape with often tragic consequences.

After we are assigned rooms to spend the night, I wander the corridors of the monastery for a time, inspecting the many paintings hanging on the walls, consisting of religious scenes, mainly, and portraits of church patriarchs. I admire the play of late afternoon light as it pours in from tremendous windows in broad diagonal shafts, asserting their hold on space as if they were solid bodies. The streaming light is modulated by baroque balustrades, reflecting glass, and other furnishings, which throw their own images on the surrounding walls, their forms visibly resonating by means of a regiment of distorted shadows. I listen, too, to the sounds made by my own movements in the building.

Osek monastery
Walking the corridors of Osek Monastery

This evening, the project organizers have arranged an organ recital in the main church of the complex, the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (Klášterní kostel Nanebevzetí Panny Marie). Built in the romanesque style in the 12th century, like so many old buildings in the Czech Republic, it was redone in the baroque style in the 18th. The vast interior of the church boasts two organs, a large one over the narthex, and a small one in one of the transepts. The recital is performed on the smaller organ, which I have partially documented in this recording.

Osek monastery
Organ recital in the cathedral of Osek

This essay was first published in Czech as Osecký klášter on 14 October, 2015 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Lost recordings

Lost recordings

As a field recordist, I sometimes think of myself as little more than a hobbyist. It’s only part of what I do, after all, and the recordings I make become part of my bank of source material, which includes many kinds of sounds, some recorded, some found, and some created from scratch. Any item might suddenly suggest something to me and be used in a composition. So simply having an audible signal with interesting qualities to begin with is sufficient means and motivation to begin a work.

In the field, I prefer to use a very small hand-held recorder and several pairs of in-ear binaural microphones by various manufacturers, which are “prosumer” quality at best. However, even these simple items can be cumbersome. It takes more than an instant to untangle the headphone cables, which always seem to mate like snakes in my bag, and seat the mikes in my ears to begin a recording. The recorder also takes time to start up as its micro-controller boots into a rudimentary operating system and the ‘ready’ screen appears. My working methods have evolved somewhat so that I can work within these limitations, but capturing a fleeting sound is nearly impossible unless you have the opportunity to prepare for it.

Things often happen quickly out in the field, and inspiration can be quickly squelched by adverse circumstances. It is common that unexpected sounds take me by surprise, and by the time the recorder can be prepared and initiated, the interesting sound is often already well underway. This is not a problem for long continuous atmospheric sounds of indeterminate length with no particular beginning or end, nor for sounds that can be predicted in advance. But for some sounds, those with definite beginnings and endings, which are discovered and dealt with as an improvisation, it usually entails compromise.

Last spring, from the window of my room in a guesthouse in Tbilisi, I suddenly heard the ringing of a nearby church carillon. The sound was very strong and pleasing as it came through the window into my room, so I scrambled for my recorder, which had been packed away, and hastily dangled the mikes out the window. The result was a very nice-sounding recording that, sadly, begins abruptly, starting as it does in the middle of the emission.

The next morning, assuming the same bells were rung daily on a schedule, I was out on the street in front of the church before 9 o’clock. There were many people around, arranging flowers on graves, cleaning the tombstones, talking to the priest, and walking about in the church yard. I sat on a bench, prepared for the carillon to begin. And I waited, but it didn’t ring that day. So this fragmentary recording from the day before is all that I have.

Lost recordings
Tbilisi carillon, near Marjanishvili Square

The next day, as we continued our journey through Georgia, we were on our way to visit the monastery of David Gareja near the southeastern border. Some two weeks before this, we had been in Svaneti, in the northeast of Georgia. There, we became familiar with the Svan defensive towers, made of flat stones, and easily identified by their characteristic form. We had also been told the story of a Svan community that had been relocated in the late 1980s to Udabno, in the southeast near David Gareja, because of a landslide that had destroyed their village. So, when we passed a cemetery on a grassy hillside, and saw smaller versions of these Svan stone towers marking some of the graves, we decided to stop for a closer look.

As soon as we stepped out in the warm springtime air, we could hear the faraway, plaintive singing of a woman’s voice, broken at times by the sound of anguished weeping. There is a tradition among Svan women, in which they sing a song of mourning, pouring out their grief over the graves of their loved ones.

I started recording while still scrambling up the hill through the dry rustling grass, and soon came upon a winding gravel foot path. I moved as invisibly as I could up the hill toward the sound of the singing. I began the recording long before it could be heard well on the recording. But, as I neared the ridge of the hill, it was not possible to stay hidden, and as soon as the woman saw me, a stranger approaching, she abruptly ended her song. So all I have this recording, a brief, tantalizing fragment, to support my story.

Lost recordings
Svan song of mourning

This essay was first published in Czech as Ztracené nahrávky on 9 September, 2015 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

A silent room

A silent room

If I sit quietly in a room and just listen, I hear a series of small events, each playing out of its own accord, and with them, like the voice-over narration from a strange and subdued documentary film, file the unburnished imaginings of my aimless thinking, walking out, one at a time, onto the proscenium of an internal world, out of space, perhaps even out of time.

The faucet drips, a floor board creaks, the house slowly settles into the earth with quiet snaps and cracks. The refrigerator purrs for a while, and then gently quakes to stop. An electric clock emits a faint motor hum and makes soft alternating clicks, as if it were walking through time. I hear outside sounds, a bird sitting in a nearby tree, singing behind the glass of my window; children bouncing an inflated ball and chattering happily. Furniture scrapes across the floor in the upstairs apartment, the electric cricket of a mobile phone rings, and a muffled voice seeps through the plaster, only one side of a conversation, a bit like the sound of one hand clapping. An imperceptible current of air sets a spider’s web to shivering, a gossamer curtain, both tense and lax. The walls themselves seem to breathe, their cracks growing deeper, darker, as the sun passes behind a parade of clouds, driven by the wind, which modulate the interior light in ever-changing intensities.

I hear also sounds inside me, I breathe, my heart beats. If I scratch my jaw or rub the nape of my neck, a sibilant rumbling is heard in my ear. If I rub my hands together, or sweep them across my clothing, I can hear a soft sound, like wind in the sand dunes. Some sounds don’t exist as physical modulations. My tinnitus is always there, but it is not produced by the regular motion of air particles; it is a malfunction of the hearing apparatus itself. And there is the underground river of blood, a constantly ebbing and flowing stream, like quickened tides. But one only hears it, or so I am told, in an anechoic chamber.

I can hear the ring of the room, it is like being inside a bell. Decades ago, in film school, when I was shooting synchronized sound indoors, I was advised to always record a few minutes of the chosen location without any talking or human activity. A supply of such “silence” was useful to give the film editor the flexibility to cut in silence here and there to create rhythm in the edited scene. The use of blank tape would only call attention to these cuts, because true technical silence has an unnatural “sound” when placed in stark comparison next to what we would call “silent” in a human context. The sound of nothing happening in the location of the filmed scene is a good way to hide these transitions. So, nothing is something. The sound of nothing happening is still a sound, excited air molecules, nearly imperceptible, their minuscule resonances the residue of the struggle of architecture against gravity. Yes, if you listen closely, the room rings.

Do this experiment. Record the sound of a room empty of any sound-making creatures or objects. Normalize it to boost the signal saturation. Apply aggressive equalization by making a narrow frequency band, pushing the volume up to the limit, and then sweep this narrow spike up and down the sound spectrum of the normalized recording. At certain places, you will hear steady tones with the eerie timbre of a singer of infinite breath holding a note. If you allow yourself, you will hear the vowel ‘a’ or ‘i’ or ‘o’ being sung, differing from frequency to frequency. Explore the character of the room, plumb the depths of its hidden life, through these more or less orderly displacements. The silence is alive, I tell you. It is a chorus.

This essay was first published in Czech as Nic je něco on 12 August, 2015 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Beyond Time: Xinaliq

Beyond Time: Xinaliq

We travel to Xinaliq on a ribbon of asphalt, frayed at the edges, and flying; because that is what it feels like as we float high above the valley bottom, with its small hidden villages, green forests, the loops of road we earlier traveled, everything. We are in temporary kinship with the pair of eagles that floats magically up from beneath us as we peer over the high crest of the pass that leads to this ancient settlement. In rays of blinding sun against a smooth blue curtain of sky, the eagles’ feathers tousled by columns of wind, one of them peers at me, and seems to recognize us.

The road crumbles at the edges, and it sometimes seems ready to dissolve of its own accord, turning into simply more falling mountain rubble, the unavoidable advance of chaos in the face of human-imposed order. Its temporary time on the earth seems about to come due. Perhaps the road itself will crumble away and no longer be here for us when we try to return.

The surrounding escarpments make dazzling, balletic leaps as they hover over us at dizzying heights. The rock forms dance and whirl around us as we our path undulates, following the score of the engineers who cut this road into the mountain’s flank only a few years ago. It makes our heads swim, and the effect is compounded with the sweet taste of the air, also laced with the earthier residues of transhumance; the tang of manure, human sweat, and dusty dry grass. Water clatters down the cliff face, and pours out from roadside pipes, utterly clear, shining, and tasting of snow.

Perhaps it is the effects of the thin air, or the untrammeled sunshine, or the serpentine movement of the automobile, but we are lifted to a state of excitement beyond the visual satisfactions of simply regarding beauty, perhaps like the ecstasies of the great painters of the Romantic movement. But we are here, this is real. The stones are hard, the wind is forceful, the sunshine browns and then reddens the skin. Gravity forever leads us toward the abyss.

Up here live people who have eked out their livings for, incredibly, some 3000 years, in comparative isolation to everyone else. No one but they (and a few academics) can understand the language they speak. The phonology of Khinalug appears to be quite rich. According to wikipedia, the Cyrillic alphabet for Khinalug contains 74 characters to represent its inventory of sounds, including digraphs, trigraphs, and tetragraphs. Recently, a Roman alphabet based on Turkish has been introduced which reduces the number of letters to 50. In any event, our local native host regales us with examples, demonstrating that the form of the verb changes depending on whether a male or a female is addressed.

Xinaliq is believed to be an ancient Caucasian village going back to the Caucasian Albanian period. According to Schulze (1994), both the local history and the linguistics of Xinaliq clearly indicate that the early speakers of Xinaliq had once migrated into their present location, during the period from 1000 BC to 300 AD. It is believed by the Xinaliq residents that the ancestors of the Xinaliq people were followers of Zoroastrianism. In the 3rd century they converted to Christianity and then to Islam in the 7th century. All residents are Muslim. Because of the high altitude and its remoteness, the Xinaliq village and its residents have managed to survive and withstand many invasions the region has witnessed. The area has many historical sites including ancient holy caves.

Xinaliq: Language, People And Geography, Tamrika Khvtisiashvili, University of Utah in Journal of Endangered Languages, Winter 2012.

We pull off the road to admire the scene. Far below us, shepherds are moving their flocks of sheep, the treasure and industry of these communties, from one grazing pasture to another. They flow slowly over the rough surfaces of the valley floor, and the less-steep parts of the valley walls. From our vantage point, we see it as a quivering pool of yellowish-white dots that moves as a unit, pushed forward by dogs and tiny men on horseback. As they come up off the rocky places and finally reach the fresher grazing grounds, a sea of chlorophyll, the sheep are excited, and they begin to run, drifting across the green tableau like a wind-driven cloud.

We watch this, standing high up on the side of the mountain, next to the road approaching Xinaliq. Across the sky there moves a broad stream of white vapor, a parade of low hanging clouds, drifting through the length of the valley, in accord with their master, the winds.

This essay was first published in Czech as Nad časem on 8 July, 2015 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Swifts

Swifts

On a back street in Baku, only a few meters from a busy metro station, we wander away from the busy motor traffic of the broad thoroughfare to find a series of tiny shops housed in improvised spaces along the dusty alley, many just the simple hole-in-the-wall type, going about their business. The shop with the sign “CD-MP3-DVD” is locked tight (no doubt the early hour is to blame), but the lingerie shop is open, as well as the one selling an endless selection of men’s black shoes. And the vegetable sellers (and their many helpers) are busy washing and arranging the greens to best effect to entice buyers to open their pockets. A greengrocers’s assistant sits on a stone. On one side of his right foot lies a pile of grape leaves. He goes through them one by one, discarding those that are too spotted, or torn, or brown at the edges, and making a neat, regular pile of the perfect ones on the ground between his feet.

In the sunlight the heat is tormenting. It fries the top of the head, and makes clothing seen heavy and constraining. But in even the smallest scrap of shade, provided by an occasional mulberry tree that juts out from a crack in a stone wall, produces a delicious cool breeze that makes one quickly forget the heat. The black stains on the pavement indicate where the ripe berries have fallen to the ground and were crushed underfoot.

Around the corner, a cheap stereo is placed on the pavement in front of an electronics shop, blaring out tinny Azerbaijani hits. Men in black trousers and white shirts and shiny pointed shoes, all with neat haircuts, stand around doing nothing, smoking, shooting the breeze. Dowdy women in headscarves with heavy grocery bags drag listless children through the crowd, sometimes stopping to closely inspect a cabbage, or inquire if the coriander is fresh, or select a few grape leaves for the evening’s dolmas.

In the nearby Yasamal district, we find a zone of random destruction, as if a capricious earthquake took this house, and not that, then the next three, leaving another one standing, and so on down the street. Baku’s minimally regulated building boom goes on like this, leaving the marks of its voracious appetites, lost teeth in the jaw of what was once a solid row of dwellings. New buildings go up, pre-fab hulks with mystifying orientalist facades, and older urban neighborhoods (which some would call slums) with their richness, character, neighborly social connections and history, are swallowed beneath them. People still live in these once dense, thriving neighborhoods. They watch us as we pass through, while we continually find new details, new scenes to photograph. We can see the wonder on the faces of the onlookers, that we find such things worthy of being remembered, of being made into an image.

“Their time is past,” states one old resident flatly. “The new buildings will be much better.” How much of this hope is a delusion is unclear. It is no doubt an attractive proposition to many in these quarters, to finally have flush toilets, paved streets, and other commonplaces of modern developed urban life. But can these people really know what they will be giving up? And do they really have any say at all in what replaces their old neighborhoods, those in which they have lived for decades, those which they have helped to create?

Swifts race these haunted ways in small groups, slicing the hot summer air to ribbons, their piercing calls seeming to drive them forward. Flying in tight formations and in closely bound groups, they round corners with unerring grace, and fluidly twist and turn to avoid electrical poles and other obstacles. Each bird must respond to the others in its group finely and swiftly. They whistle and peal as they neatly swing around obstacles, hewing to the contour of the streets, never seeming to come to rest anywhere. They flit and flutter and dart and dodge, and in the patterns they make, evince a kinetic ecstasy, a special craft, a gift for the marvelous. Then they disappear as quickly as they appeared, leaving only the shrill mental echoes of their passing.

Swifts
Swifts fly past a window in Qǝncǝ, Azerbaijan

This essay was first published in Czech as Rorýsi on 11 June, 2015 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Paternoster

Paternoster

I stand in an upright casket and ascend to the sound of a gentle rumbling, a low wooden thrum, regular like a heartbeat, together with the occasional mousey squeak of gears and chains. Surrounded on five sides by cello-colored wood, I am hanging in a small chamber, loosely fitted in a vertical tunnel, so that any shift of my weight, say from one foot to the other, causes the sides of the box to softly strike against the walls of the shaft with a deep throaty rattle.

At regular, slow, intervals, the open side of the box faces well-lit corridors, some bleak and empty; others rustling with footsteps, but the ascent of the car continues. The light dims as the edge of a floor descends before me, which is then followed by another bright corridor; a series of them passes by. Occasionally, I see a person or two standing, waiting. The alternating bright and dark, an ebb and flow of light, a lugubrious pulsation, makes a mechanized mockery of sunrise and sunset from these quick false days and nights.

A posted message and a black line warns me back. Step off! Step off now! But I disobey, I vow to go up and over the top. I feel a mild fluttering in my stomach as the line is crossed. I know it must be safe, but nonetheless I am gripped by the inevitability of this cyclic motion, an unreleased tension, a fated-ness, as if passing a line of no return. I rise further, into the unknown, as a wall descends, closing off the open side of the box. It’s too late now for a different decision! I travel in a vertical passage of darkness.

The motion of ascent subtly changes, and the car, with a soft jolt, begins to move to the right as the ascent also slows, though the speed of travel, considered without regard to its direction, remains constant. At the top of the trajectory, through a small opening visible only momentarily at the top of the open side of the car, I get a glimpse of a dusty attic, radiant with rays of the afternoon sun neatly sculpted in ambient dust, a sham golden heaven, forever denied. No sooner has our upward and rightward motion crested, than the box starts back down. Another soft jolt and we slide slowly down another shaft, and the second act begins.

The sequence continues as before, but this time I am descending. On its fixed track, the revolution of the machine lifts and lowers a loop of wooden boxes in precise balance, as many such boxes rising as falling at any given time, so much motion standing still, like the mythical perpetuum mobile. When we get to the bottom, what lies beneath? A dark cave, a black fundament. For a short time, I become a dim spectre, outlined in the whispering sliver of light left to me.

Paternoster
Field recording from a paternoster on V jamě street, Prague

The paternoster elevator, of which there are numerous working examples in Prague, take the form of a series vertical train cars running in a pair of adjacent shafts. Its orbit depends on a configuration of gears and rollers, pulleys and chains, and two large offset wheels at the top and bottom. Fed with electricity, it moves cyclically between its zenith and nadir, shuttling people up and down as they go about their business.

The name paternoster evokes a prayer, because the series of cabinets on a track forming a loop resembles the beads on a rosary. Perhaps a prayer is in order, for a newspaper article linked from a Wikipedia page informs me, “At least five people have been killed by paternosters since 1970…”, often elderly people, whose agility and coordination may be compromised, who mis-step and are crushed in the works.

But the wheels roll lethargically, predictably, always in the down direction on one side and up in the other. Standing ready, transfixed, waiting for the floor of the car to rise or fall, one waits. Then, with a split second of tension, a glimpse of death, one steps on. But the floor rises up in front of you to greet your step, pushing up from below onto the sole of your forward foot, and you are then carried upward like an angel.

This essay was first published in Czech as Paternoster on 13 May, 2015 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Road to Ushguli

Road to Ushguli

I awaken before dawn in our guesthouse in Mestia, I see that it has snowed in the night. The air is very still, and in the misty light, every rooftop, tree and fence is outlined with a sparkling trim of purest white, piled with exquisite fragility atop every form, down to the smallest twig. Electrical wires, sagging gracefully between poles, have become fat white ribbons, snowflakes delicately placed a hand’s width high and narrow as the wire itself, a fine tracery that the slightest air current would surely destroy.

The silence of the laden air is further dampened by low-hanging clouds, still wet and heavy with their storehold of clumped snowflakes. The air seems so artificially still that I put a fingertip into each ear and massage them gently, a vain attempt to clear my hearing by dislodging the apparent bubble of air in my head. Then, across the mass of cold air, the sound of a faraway rooster crowing re-orients my perceptions.

We set off for Ushguli in a four-wheel drive jeep driven by the proprietor of our guest house. The streets are largely empty at this early hour, and puddles of water in the road catch the light of our headlamps, glazing the pavement with dazzling rosy light. The thrum of the motor stirs the local hounds into a snarling frenzy, and they chase us off into the countryside, barking at our rear tires until they are satisfied that we are not turning back.

Leaving the town, the road we find is narrow and snow packed, occasionally dissolving into troughs of dark mud. It hews closely to the contours of the valley, a zig-zagging rivulet of ruts, broken by random streams of trickling melt water. These washouts and bumps either slow us down or completely stop us as the driver pauses to consider what has been placed before him. Then, skillfully playing the gear train and steering wheel, we creep across, jolting and rocking, and go on. We expect to travel the 40 km to Ushguli in three or four hours. Sometimes, crossing a bad spot, we would have to get out and push, and we brace our feet deep in the wet snow, our muscles straining to help the tire treads, spinning like rubber galaxies in a universe of ice, bite into a fresh surface and find traction.

“Saakashvili built this road,” the driver informs us, referring to the ousted former president. “Back then, everything was possible. Now nothing happens.”

As we round a bend, we can see ahead a small creek cutting across the road, dredging a deep furrow in the road surface, and flowing around some boulders. Carefully inching forward, we are almost across, and about to gun it for the momentum needed to climb out of the depression. But the front tire abruptly slips off a boulder, striking our undercarriage with the grinding sound of unyielding rock against steel. We lurch to a complete stop, and the engine dies. The driver tries repeatedly, but can not restart it. Struck by the boulder, the fuel line has been crimped.

He phones ahead to the next village, and in a few minutes, another vehicle arrives with three men, followed by a fourth riding bareback on a brown horse. After much discussion and head-wagging over the open engine compartment, the driver finally crawls under the vehicle to inspect the damage. It is decided to phone up a relative of his who lives in Ushguli, who will come down and take us up the rest of the way. Then we admire the spectacle of our broken-down jeep being towed by a team of four oxen up the road to the next village, where the new driver will meet us.

We trudge on ahead of the oxen, passing some abandoned houses, yawning wrecks with shutters askew and crumbling plaster. As the attraction of modern living grew strong, I suppose, people had simply discarded these buildings for better living conditions elsewhere. It was not hard to imagine, considering the isolation that must be felt in the dead of winter in an inaccessible place like this. We find a rather fine rendition of Stalin’s face scratched into the plaster of one of the houses.

Soon after that, we say goodbye to the first driver, and climb into the jeep of the second. As if to further signal a new chapter in this adventure, after a few bends, the character of the road, too, changes. It becomes narrower, more raw, more treacherous. It seems even more unfinished than the previous stretch, with a sheer wall of rock to our left, and a perilous drop to our right. As the sun begins to peek out intermittently from behind its blind of clouds, we see an otherworldly vista unfold before us, mountains in ghostly shrouds of snow, bristling with black trees, against cloud-dappled skies of the deepest blue.

We arrive in Ushguli late in the afternoon, nestled in its high mountain valley, apparently untroubled by the passing of time. It sits encircled by gentle white slopes of snow-covered pasture that rise gradually up to the dominating peaks that surround it. We have scarcely an hour of daylight left to explore the Svan defensive towers, characteristic of the place, and get a sense of this extraordinary settlement. A UNESCO world heritage site, it is cited as the highest settlement in Europe that is inhabited the year round.

We wander among the thousand-year old structures of the lower village, occasionally encountering a skinny cow or a sad-looking horse, but no people. Walls composed of irregular flat gray stone, home to rusty orange lichens and dry tussocks of fine grass, surround us. The quiet is broken by the occasional cock-crow, barking dog, or the mooing of a discontented cow. A small pack of hungry-looking, semi-wild dogs take note of our presence, and we are wary of them, at the same time trying to make as many photographs as we can in the waning light.

Eventually, we rejoin the driver on the main road further up in the small group of villages. We are cold and hungry, breakfast having been our only meal that day. He proposes to take us to the house of some people he knows, and so we slip, stumble and climb up the crude rocky trail that passes for a village street. Along the way, we come to a small group of children, perhaps heading home from the local school. They are lead by a pair of small boys, who greet us proudly in English. I greet them back, and they smile and continue scurrying down the trail to the lower part of the village.

We come to a house, and a woman responds to our knock, peering at us from a window. She invites us into a warm steamy kitchen, where she is already preparing the khachapuri for her family’s evening meal. We are given places at the table.

Her father-in-law, some seventy years old, enters the room at the sound of guests arriving (“A guest is a gift from God,” goes the old Georgian saying), bringing with him a bottle of home-made brandy. He informs us that, during Soviet times, he was an airplane pilot based in Kyiv, and he now teaches Russian to children at the local school. As we eat, he toasts with us three times (thrice is the custom, he informs us), to family, to friendship, and that there may be no war in Donetsk, Abkhazia, or South Ossetia.

Later in the night, back in Mestia, we reunite with the first driver over supper at his guest house. The women of the house serve us plates of seriously good homemade food and a pitcher of chilled white wine. Between glasses drunk down and the inevitable, but heartfelt, toasts to friendship and the like, he tells us with pride, “It was useful to have that breakdown, so now you see how my neighbors respect me and come to help me when I need it.”

This essay was first published in Czech as Svanetie on 8 April, 2015 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Mountain of song

Mountain of song

1. Svaneti

The road from Zugdidi to Mestia lies in the valley of the river Inguri, entering the Greater Caucasus mountain range from the south. It is a restless, tormented road, slithering like a swimming serpent in the February muck, keeping the frothing river as its close companion. In following its many switchbacks and swerves, the forces of motion pull on the passengers of our marshrutka (minibus), causing them to lean first to the left, then to the right, in the fashion of an inverted pendulum. We pass through brown and green valleys readying themselves for a fulgent spring, still weeks in the future, its promise is buried under mud, wet rocks, and leafless woods. We look, bedazzled, at the shining mountains, becoming ever higher, ever whiter as we ascend. The driver must often dodge the scattered rocks, and occasional boulders, that tumble at random onto the road from the slopes above. Once in a while, we passengers are obliged to step out and help clear the road of stones so that the journey can continue.

A narrow patch of gravel and a wooden house appear at the side of the road as we make our way around another hairpin turn. Our driver abruptly comes to a stop there. We are at a roadside eatery, pressed between the winding highway and the mountain face, right next to a raging stream in rapid descent to the valley floor. “How long do we stop?” we want to know. “As long as it feels good!” is the reply. We go in, ask what is available, and order dishes of rich mutton stew. At the next table, the driver sits with friends, and is soon joined by another man, his daughter, and her boyfriend. Georgian khachapuri, a cheese pastry (here in Svaneti it also includes meat) and little glasses of chacha (strong liquor distilled from grapes) are served. At their encouragement, the daughter begins to play and sing on her panduri.

Mountain of song
Songs in the roadside Inn, between Zugdidi and Mestia

A few days later, we leave Svaneti, traveling by marshrutka from Mestia to Tbilisi in a single long day. The journey makes a broad loop to the west, through Zugdidi and south to Kutaisi, before finally catching the main highway east that leads to the capital.

We wake early, and in the weak morning light, make our way carefully down the steep icy lane from our lodgings up on a hill, down to the main road through Mestia, where the minibus awaits us. We are among the first passengers, but there is a man already sitting in the back, carelessly smoking a cigarette. We ride for a few hours in the semi-darkness, and the headlamps occasionally pick out figures standing next to the road. If they signal, we may stop to pick them up as passengers, or perhaps the driver takes only large parcels from them, stowing them in the luggage area in the back. Evidently, the markets of Tbilisi are served by these minibuses bringing in local products from all over the country in small quantities like this.

About mid-morning, we come upon a crossroads where two men are standing in the mud next to some bulky bundles and some luggage. They signal the driver to stop, and then board the marshrutka, naming their destination, Tbilisi. Then they squeeze their way through the narrow aisle to the remaining empty seats in the back. One of them, a tall young man, wears a typical gray Svan felt cap, shaped like a bowl and stitched crosswise twice, forming black cross over the crown. He wears thick eyeglasses and carries a panduri.

We ride for a few miles down the road, and each time we round a corner, it’s as if a curtain is pulled back to reveal a new mountain scene, each one seeming more splendid than the last. The early morning light picks out sudden details; a patch of white snow atop a blue peak, a shining mountain, radiant in the contrast of a gray cloud, or the glint of a rushing stream falling down the mountain side, making the black rocks beneath it shine. Black and white sheep and goats cluster in grassy valleys as we approach the lowlands. Reddish cows wander the fields and villages as they please, and often stray onto the roads, and the driver, ever alert for these obstacles, must slow down to avoid hitting them.

Suddenly, from the back of the bus, the young Svan stops aimlessly strumming his panduri, and begins to sing.

Mountain of song
Songs on the road from Mestia
შენმა სურვილმა დამლია
შენზე ფიქრმა და სევდამან.
შორს წასვლამ, ხშირად გაყრამან
გულის თვალებით ხედვამან

ცაზედ მოდიან წერონი,
მწკრივადა, ჯარის-ჯარადა
ვერა ხედავთა ტივლებო,
ცრემლი ჩამამდის ღვარადა

შენ ჩემს გულს ვეღარ მაიგებ,
ჩემი სათქმელიც ის არის,
გადამაგდე და დამკარგე
როგორც ჩერქეზმა ისარი.
Desire for you has drained me.
My thoughts do not stray
From my heartache, and I see you
Only with the eyes of my heart.

The cranes fly to the waters
of the Adjaran lowlands.
My eyes, so filled with tears
no longer see the mountain.

You’ve lost my heart,
I say this to you,
You threw me away and I fled
Like a Circassian arrow let fly.

Here is another version of the second song, performed by the Georgian folklorist Lela Tataraidze and her ensemble.

Mountain of song
ლელა თათარაიძე & ანსამბლი კელაპტარი : შენმა სურვილმა დამლია

2. Tbilisi

We spend four days in Tbilisi, exploring its crumbling old town, visiting its churches, ancient and new, sitting in its cafés, and wandering its neighborhoods. In an underground pedestrian passage, we come across two young men singing for coins at the foot of the steps leading down into the damp corridors.

Mountain of song
Buskers in an understreet passage, Tbilisi

During our stay in Tbilisi, we are greeted at the entrance of the State Museum of Folk Songs and Instruments by one of the curators, who eagerly walks us through the exhibits, consisting of regional instruments, as well as European ones. While we are there, a group of school children arrives with their teachers, and are sat down before a slideshow presentation that explains a bit about each instrument, with recordings of how they sound. When the panduri appears on the screen, and the recording of it plays, a small boy, perhaps 8 years old, spontaneously rises to to his feet and dances what the Russians call the lezginka, a traditional Caucasian dance, to the great approval and encouragement of both his teachers and his classmates. They clap along as the panduri plays.

Mountain of song
At the Museum of Folk Songs and Instruments, Tbilisi

3. Kakheti

We journey through Kakheti by car, traveling for a time alongside the river Alazani, which seems as much filled with white stones as running water. Around a bend, a bridge suddenly appears with a thick rope stretched across its road bed, pulled taut by a group of people in crude masks and ragged costumes. They shout and wave their arms, and our first impulse is to throw the car into reverse and quickly get away. But it soon becomes clear that they mean no harm, they are only revelers, and when approached, they ask only for a symbolic toll for crossing the bridge. We offer them a few lari, perhaps 50 kč, and we are allowed through. But I immediately sense a missed opportunity, so we stop the car, and I go back to them with my audio recorder, and, groping for the Georgian word simghera, I ask them for a song. But it soon becomes clear that they are not musicians, the accordion they have with them is just for show.

Mountain of song
Revelers at a bridge between Sanavardo and Velitshike, Kakheti

This essay was first published in Czech as Hora písní on 11 March, 2015 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Exahalation

Exhalation

The evening sounds like the consonant h, an exhalation, an eternal flood of breath. Or a soft friction, an s alternating with a lower pitched š. From somewhere out in this fog of sibilance, a telephone rings eternally, crows caw and dogs bark; babies cry. A moment awake, then a passage through sleep, this is how the depth of the night unravels. Isles of consciousness in a sea of oblivion.

In my dislocation, like a tropical fever, I sleep in fits and each time wake to this atmosphere, this ocean of strange air, altered in distinct phases as if marked by the sweeping hand of time. Late evening, the traffic lessens and the bleat of motorized vehicle horns gradually subsides. By midnight, there is a wash of sound, just the unfocused white noise of the wind in the leaves, blended with the soft chaos of every other thing happening in the neighborhood, the actions of the quick upon the inert. Through the deepest night, this further quiets, becoming almost featureless, broken only by the faraway steel bellow of the occasional horns that sound whenever a train arrives in the station. Then the pre-dawn phase begins, a rustling slowly rising as the ambience seems to heat up according to the angle of the sun.

I am in India and listening at the window of a hotel in Pune and thinking about the bottomless well of sounds that are present here, stirred up by the steady activities of the inhabitants, like dust clouds in hot winds. Sound is exuberant here, it brooks no reticence and resounds without restraint. The train horns I mentioned, loudly announcing their arrival at the station some 4 kilometers distant, are smeared by echoes into persistent resonant tones that pierce the sonic mist like radio beacons from an arctic islet. A dilation of time, wrought by distance, changes these hot, sturdy sounds into cold and frail ones that must be attended to closely or simply not heard.

In their passage, brisk, bright sounds are torn apart by the strut and surface of buildings and other intervening forms, shredded by the mass and matter of the things of the city, and reassembled around my ears as ghostly groans and soothing whispers. They are cast among the rocks, split asunder into their millions of parts, and arrive both in and out of order, deformed and reformed by their passage, assembled into new sounds, each one marked by their journey in ways, small and many, that utterly transform them.

In the early morning, the reedy whine of an electronic instrument plays the tune to “Silent Night” that begins the daily lessons in a children’s school somewhere below me. Then the strong-voiced teacher leads the flock of little voices in endless repetitions of their A-B-C’s. Nearby, a repair shop operates some kind of machine that makes a sort of sad laughter out of something very hard evidently turning against something else made of metal, like the shriek of some great turgid metallic monkey baring its teeth at a passing tourist. It is hidden from my view; I cannot describe it any better.

The great clock that we live on sends the sun up on its greased rail and the next act begins. A million alarm clocks rouse the city into a restless state, an itch to be alleviated only by spilling out into the streets in inexhaustible numbers. The gentler earlier sounds are drowned by the incessant squawking of vehicle horns bursting with the randomness of popping corn. There is a pecking order with the horns. Bikes have toy-like squeaks, motorbikes and rickshaws a kind of tinny insistent bleat that leaves the ears tickling, cars have louder horns still, and trucks and busses bear down with the full shuddering blast of ochestral thunder.

I wander streets with inscrutable signs, the devanagari script keeps its secrets from me. I look at fruits and vegetables that I have never before seen and wonder if they are sweet, bitter or bland. I peer into courtyards and wonder at the organization of life and neighbors within them. I visit temples and stand aside as I watch mysterious rituals of bells, chanting, water and fire, evidently full of a significance that I can only guess at.

I sit in little food stalls, with their open fronts and improvised furniture, and order coffee. In response to this request, they give me a small cup of Nescafé dissolved in hot milk, very sweet, sticky with sugar. The locals sitting there are studying me slyly; perhaps tourists don’t often sit in places like this. But as I, too, am covertly studying them, it is a moment of perfect reciprocity.

This essay was first published in Czech as Výdech on 11 February, 2015 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Metro

Metro

The metro is a network system of linear spaces where masses of people come together, pass through, and part, while in motion through an underground system of escalators, tunnels, platforms and corridors, with the objective of each person getting from a point A and arriving at a point B.

As an underground system, the metro is necessarily a space apart from the happier face of the city in sunlight, being confined beneath it to dark, meandering passages, and comprising a Hades, an underworld, with rats and dirt and clotted grease. The metro, despite its historical novelty, feels ancient. A clinging smell hangs in the air, a mixture of electricity, sweat, sausage, and machine oil. It is a kind of wormhole that sucks up human particles on the surface, and then spits them out elsewhere. Its riders submerge, as if in a submarine, and each stop, each rise to the surface, is a new little world, a planet unto itself, a unique urban context. The metro strings them together like a necklace of pearls on a black thread.

Subjectively, the metro is a particular set of sensations involving rhythm and kinesis, muscular control modulated by visual and auditory stimuli, and individuals moving through its linear spaces behave in the manner of a particle stream. A person moves either with or against the flow, an invisible, but particularly salient force. One feels it rather strongly in the legs and in the torso, a momentum of the physical weight of the body, and its intentionality, dynamically altered in close coordination with all the other passing human particles, each also with their own moment and intent. It is self-arranging, and thus somewhat chaotic, and hence, unpredictable. People rush, generally plowing forward, observing cues that land them in the right spot. Someone might stop short, an outwardly random event, and it is instantly perceived by fellow particles, if they are alert, and they adjust accordingly. But in the main, flow predominates and the sharp edges of all other forces are smoothed away in submission to its bidding.

MetroMetroMetroMetro

I was met with a stark example of this flow once in Saigon, where I was confronted with the normally straightforward problem of crossing a major street. A gapless, stopless, torrent of traffic raged, like water in a bursting river, or corpuscles in a bloodstream. Crossing flows of traffic were delicately interleaving at the intersection, rather that stopping and taking turns. How to get across? Anyone reckless enough to venture into this cosmic inevitability would surely be trampled beneath a hundred bicycles, a dozen motorcycles, a car, or a city bus. Sensing my perplexity, an old man came and stood at the edge of the street next to me. With a look that said, “Watch how I do it!” he started across. Encouraged by his intrepid example, I followed. Enlightenment came. I immediately understood that to keep moving at a regular speed was safe, but one must never, ever stop. Stopping in flow introduces a random event; it creates unpredictability and chaos. Just keep moving. The flow is all.

In Kyiv, once, the opposite happened. Trying to enter the metro at the train station, I saw a crowd of hundreds of people funneling in through a single open door of the metro station. An entire wall of maybe ten doorways was available, of these, nine were locked tight. Overhearing a conversation, I came to understand the meaning of this conundrum. Overcrowding on the metro platform was so common in Kyiv, that it was dangerous to let too many people onto the platform at once, lest someone be accidentally pushed onto the tracks. This was the simple solution, use brute force to reduce the flow so the overcrowded trains could carry riders away at a rate that brought an equilibrium of safety.

When in the flow, little conscious thought is needed to obey it. Instinctively one seeks to hold momentum and personal space, observing signs, pausing only at points where one is in need of finding bearings. We pass like phantoms beneath harsh lights of mercury vapor, and our faces, bled of color, only dimly recognize one another as fellow humans. Tight within our sensate imaginary cocoons, the psychic shells that float through space along with us, we are sometimes, in this place, as alone as we can ever be. Our tribal brethren are reduced to merely the cold stream of their firmer embodiments, a charged plasma alongside which we slide, and usually, ignore. Perhaps we do so too easily.

MetroMetroMetro

The short film Metrum was made by Ivan Balaďa in 1967 under the Czechoslovak Army’s film unit. In it, Balaďa’s camera wanders the Moscow metro system, purposely moving against the crowd so we can study the faces and postures of thousands of passing people, finding on them a thousand worries, both quotidian and existential. In counterpoint to the incidental sounds of the metro and shoe heels tapping on hard pavement, we hear choral singing from the Orthodox mass. Conceived by its producers as a propaganda film to extoll the metro, when Balaďa’s piece was finally screened, it was shelved by censors.

An endless rain of passengers descends and ascends the escalators, like the ladder of Jacob, in what, a grotesque parody of the cycles of nature? Because the camera is always in motion, a sea of heads becomes a sea of souls, yearning, striving, struggling souls; here is our parody, the metro is the path of the soul through life. Some figures are silhouetted, dark, secretive; other faces find the light and we can read something of their character. They are anonymous in their numbers, each one is everyone, a symbolic being. Early, the camera finds and briefly follows a pregnant woman the passage; later in the film another woman cradles a sleeping child as she waits for her train, a madonna. A lone passenger scrutinizes a schematic map, trying to find the one true answer. An abrupt cut, and a train roars into the station, shimmering with light and the squeak of brakes, the same kind of wagons that, not so long ago, ran on Prague’s metro lines. People get off and on, and the flow continues.

The final shot leaves little doubt. We emerge from a tunnel, and the overexposed frame blinds us with white light, recalling the stories survivors tell of their near-death experiences.

In the early 60s, Soviet singer-songwriter Bulat Okudjava wrote and performed Song of the Moscow Metro. Its themes, instinctively or on purpose, are strongly echoed in Balaďa’s film.

Булат Окуджава: Песенка О Московском Метро
Мне в моем метро никогда не тесно,
потому что с детства оно, как песня,
где вместо припева, вместо припева:
- Стойте справа! Проходите слева!

Порядок вечен, порядок свят.
Те, что справа, стоят, стоят.
Но те, что идут, всегда должны
держаться левой стороны.
In my metro, it is never crowded,
because since childhood, like a song,
sings its choir. The choir sings:
“Stand to the right! Walk on the left!”

The order is eternal, the order is holy,
Those on the right, they stand, they stand.
But to those who are walking, you must
always walk on the left-hand side.
MetroMetroMetro

This essay was first published in Czech as Metro on 13 January, 2015 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Ghost fiddler

Ghost fiddler

Recently one evening, I was walking along Celetná Street in the Old Town. The yellowish lights of the shops spilled out onto the old street, and spread a golden varnish over the peaks of the cobblestones, which rustled with the whisper of many feet, the sound of the throngs who are nearly always to be found there. It happened to be the last day of October, the Eve of All Saints, an unusually warm evening for the autumn, perfectly suited for a long aimless walk. This is a date long connected with ghosts, masks, make-believe, and things being not quite as they appear. The Anglo-Celtic Halowe’en recalls the old belief that the yearly harvest is followed by a liminal time during which the spirits of the departed can more easily pass among the living.

I was nearing the Municipal House when I began to hear a high-pitched, ghostly, ringing music, somewhat difficult to locate precisely, with a sound that resembled either a breath instrument, or a stringed one. This eerie sound, I found, was seeping out from the midst of a small gathering of tourists, at the nucleus of which stood a man performing a tune reminiscent of Mozart on a verrilion, also known as a water glass harp. He held his audience completely in thrall.

Ghost fiddler
A group of tourists laughs at the ghost fiddler’s antics.

The verrilionist was standing at a table with a perhaps two dozen wine glasses of various sizes, each containing a quantity of clear water. With unerring technique, he repeatedly dipped the pads of his fingertips into these tiny ponds, and with a practiced stroke pressed on the rim of a glass, a gentle and precise friction that sounded a note by exciting the vessel into ringing vibration. His performance was seamless, with chords, arpeggios, crescendos and glissandos, a wall of ethereal sweetness that, in spite of the perhaps cloying nature of the medium, held a fascination for its morbid, other-worldly quality, which enchants as much as it entertains. It is probably for reasons like this that the instrument has sometimes been called the ghost fiddle. In the 18th century, similar instruments enjoyed a certain vogue, and legends from this time caution us not to indulge in it too much, either in listening or playing, because those who are sensitive to melancholy were thought to be at risk of insanity because of its strange, sad sound.

The supple hands of the ghost fiddler fluttered like little hummingbirds over the glasses’ halos, seeking the sweet essence of the music, and the fairie-like ring of it was a sheer delight. The tourists were recording the performance on mobile phones, paying homage to the performer by tossing coins into a pot laid before him. A lake of sweat grew on the musician’s upper back, soaking through his sweater. He gave the performance every possible nuance of gesture and force. That night, he seemed to be playing in peak form. The audience stood, jaws slack, eyes wide; the eyes of some glistened with tears. There is a reverent hush of awe, as they listened, rapt.

It was a little after ten o’clock when I retreated back down Celetná, toward Old Town Square. I approached the spot where, for nearly 300 years, stood the Marian Column, until 1918, when it was pulled down by a mob, who saw it as a symbol of Austrian oppression. The location of the former column is now marked on the pavement by memorial slabs of granite with epitaphic inscriptions in four languages that read, “Here stood and will stand again the Mary’s Statue. Years ago, on my first visit to this spot, I had noticed that, curiously, some later vandal had chipped away selected words from each of the inscriptions in an effort to neutralize the affirmation that the column will stand again. It is clear that the site still evokes strong feelings, and some apparently wish that the monument never again stand, opposing the aspirational inscriptions that explicitly call for its rebuilding.

Ghost fiddler

But on this evening, as I approached the spot, I was a bit startled to see a young nun in a traditional black habit, holding in her arms a bouquet of white lilies, a symbol of resurrection. Her head was bowed solemnly in prayer. As she was about to kneel and lay the bouquet on the memorial where the column once stood, I took out my camera and quickly made an image, taking no time to adjust the settings. I intended to make a series of better exposures, but it was too late. The nun had already noticed the presence of a photographer. I could see the surprise and alarm on her face. Before I could take another picture, she dashed off, cradling the the lilies in her arms as if protecting an infant from the rain, and disappeared into the crowd.

Ghost fiddler

This essay was first published in Czech as Housle duchů on 10 December, 2014 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Fragments of a journey

Fragments of a journey

I come to the city of Wrocław, the former Breslau, by train. Until Pardubice, the train is modern and certain, spacious and sleek. In the arms of this doleful efficiency, I sleep. From Pardubice, we step through a looking glass, and the fabric and character of the journey are wholly transformed. The wagons, now subdivided into dark and cozy cabins, no longer slice smoothly through the cold morning air, they jostle and shake gently, a half-hearted rebellion against friction and gravity. A train of infinite patience, it pauses to stop at every hamlet, no matter how small, and heeds the whim of any local dweller to travel, from one whistle-stop to the next, on this particular day.

At each grade level crossing, we pass a semaphore, our motion smearing the sounds of the dinging bells, like a foley cue from an old spy film. It begins high on the musical scale and then smoothly sweeps downward, simultaneously rising and falling in loudness, a small seance to summon the spirit of Christian Doppler. It was he who, in 1842 at the Prague Polytechnic, proposed an explanation to account for the audible change in pitch of a sound that is in motion relative to a perceiver. Doppler extrapolated his principle to all forms of undulating energy, so it is due to him that we can divine the relative velocities of the stars, a fundamental tool for knowing where we are among all things that exist. This was no small contribution.

Crossing the border into Poland, the stops become less frequent, the scenery a bit flatter and more docile, a green land, fertilized with the blood of nations, and their ashes. Sometimes, this pastorale is broken by the sooty apparition of a vast complex of rusting equipment and fuming smokestacks, sitting among pits and piles of disturbed earth. The sky shimmers with surprising sparks, as small birds with wings black on top, but white undersides, flap their way over the fields in tight, elastically bound clusters, glinting like diamond dust rendered in an animated gif from a Japanese web site.

The postwar past of Wrocław is a tragic saga of mass migrations, people forced in large numbers to leave their homes, only to be replaced by waves of newcomers who themselves were driven out of their abodes. Architectural forms devised to suit the needs of the previous denizens at times found an odd fit with the recently arrived. This has left this richly layered city fragmented, but not broken. Wrocław spreads out in all directions from a center that is fractured by some dozen islands in the river Odra. These islets sit firmly in the brown water among a lacework of bridges, like so many foundering barges heaped up with earth and crowned with traces of a past cultural, religious and industrial. If the dazzle of the early morning sun blinds and obscures, its sieve also showers light on the diaphanous scrims of vapor that hang between us and Baroque façades, bell towers, blocks of flats, and chimneys that shy behind cold curtains of mist. Ducks glide, drawing wakes, recalling the resonances of sound waves made visible. Black crows in vests of gray, de-tuned trumpets squawking with the compressive thrust of a dog’s squeak toy, play games in mid-air, at times floating down to scrabble over bits of bread and other things interesting to crows. An autumn tree, its few remaining leaves rocking back and forth in the soft breeze, a glint of intermittent gold, a dazzle, a rustling of their almost silent tissues.

The trams here squeal like stuck pigs as they carefully round tight corners, blue painted boxes with large windows on steel wheels, filled with lego-land passengers moving on to the next moment of their lives. Old buildings are festooned with a blight of bubbling masonry, crumbling plaster façades, and a cast of thousands in the form of molded plaster busts crouch in dim alcoves, niches for effigies of the once admired, but now obscure.

We come across a meridian line on the sidewalk ceremoniously marked by a bronze plaque. The building it points to, the Uniwersytet Wrocławski, houses a museum crested with an astronomical observatory. Ascending the steps, we find a high opening in the wall that admits a single streak of sunlight, projecting onto the floor and forming a line of light that marks the meridian (in the modern exhibit, this line is “enhanced” with a string of LEDs). If Doppler’s shift is dynamic and ever varying, a dance of sound and movement, this line is steady and sure. It follows the edge of Euclid’s ruler, and fixes our location in time with a certainty that seems God-like.

This essay was first published in Czech as Střípky jedné cesty on 12 November, 2014 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Father of apples

Father of apples

The city of Almaty lies in the foothills of the Ile Alatau mountains in southern Kazakhstan, near its border with Kyrgyzstan. Although there were already settlements in the area dating back to the time of the Silk Road, Almaty’s present aspect descends largely from the Soviet era. It is, by appearances, neither an old city, nor in some ways a Kazakh city, having been built up and planned mainly by Russians. In the 19th-century, they founded a fort named Verniy, a far-flung outpost of the Czar, on the site of an old oasis named Almatu, which gradually became today’s city of Almaty.

The name of the city is inevitably associated with apples. During the Soviet era and up until 1993, Almaty’s official name was Alma-Ata, which in the Turkic language of the Kazakhs, means “father of apples”. Indeed, the city lies within a region where unique forests of wild apple trees still cling tenuously to their original habitat, threatened by industrial pollution and urban encroachment. Yet they survive. These foothills are considered today by plant specialists to be the ancestral home of all modern cultivars of apples.

Almaty comprises a strict grid of concrete and brick buildings cleft by streets alongside which often run cement-lined channels running with clear mountain water. Little bridges or impromptu culverts allow pedestrians to pass over these channels from street to sidewalk. Massive poplar trees, chestnuts, spruces and elms grow everywhere. Pyramids of fragrant watermelons are piled up on street corners for sale, while glowering men dressed in suit jackets with shirts open at the necks sit under shade trees nearby, to keep an eye on their wares. Old women sit at card tables along sidewalks and on plazas, to sell cigarettes, matches, paper handkerchiefs, chewing gum, razor blades, and similar sundries. With the sound of trickling water all around and the late summer wind in the trees, many parts of Almaty enjoy an almost pastoral ambience, surprising for a rectilinear city of a million and a half people.

Riding the tram in Almaty requires a sense of adventure and some local knowledge, for the tram stops are very often not marked in any evident way. One develops the practice of simply joining a group of people standing near the tracks who look like they might be waiting for a tram, and then waiting there alongside them.

I rode in an old tram car that was apparently acquired by the city secondhand; the schematic transit maps of another city were still blazoned on its side panels. As we rattled and screeched down the broad avenue, I happened to turn and look back, and was stunned to see a geyser of spraying water and steam erupting in the middle of an intersection that we had just crossed over only moments before. At the next stop, I stepped off and made my way back to see what had happened. By that time, the force of the water had slackened, and I could see that an old conduit for hot water had burst under the street, pushing aside earth and asphalt, leaving an opening large enough to stop two lanes of traffic. I looked down into the pit of cleanly scoured paving stones and hot mud, and I overheard one bystander say, “All of the city’s pipes are old, so this happens sometimes.”

I came to a Russian-style wooden structure once known as the “officer’s house”, which now houses the Museum of Kazakh Musical Instruments. After browsing the collection, I was approached by a Kazakh gentleman holding a dombyra (домбыра), a kind of two-stringed lute. He asked me if I’d like to hear him play. I readily agreed. Through his cheerful face, I could see a slight brokenness or weariness about him, but his demeanor grew radiant as he sang. Although he drew his selections from numerous world traditions, he made each of the songs his own, singing and strumming with the professional confidence of a man who makes music for a living. I listened, transfixed.

He then offered to sell me an unlabelled cassette, undoubtedly self-recorded, that included a slip of typewritten notes, looking like some kind of secret code, but simply in Russian, typed without spaces. It reads:

Of all 31 songs, 13 written by artist, 18 songs from national composers, which is: Han (Chinese), Indian, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Mongolian, Tatar. All sung in Kazakh language and performed on dombyra by artist, onsalest [sic], actor, poet, composer Abylai Zhümaqanovich Tugelbaev 2004 Almaty. [signed,] Abylai.

This essay was first published in Czech as Přežít on 8 October, 2014 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.

Bird calls

Bird Calls

We, most of us, live in the thrall of the city, it is our refuge, it is our wild jungle to explore. The city has existed in one form or another for 10 thousand years, and during much of that time, the development of cities was haphazard and organic. Cities were forces of nature, growing as their wont, oozing along shores, seeping across plains, and creeping up hillsides, bringing with them the humans that throve within their bounds. Cities are whirlpools attracting human particles, they who have set themselves in motion, and as they continue to drift in droves into cities, the average world human becomes an urban dweller. This is a polar flip from just a hundred years ago, when most of us dwelt in the countryside.

In a recent filecast, I used the sound of steel against steel, and likened it to a strange bird call whose habitat is a blackened jungle, making use of the rousing noises of the city as an evocation of this polar flip. I recall hearing this strange, ringing, piping sound while standing on the Alexanderplatz in Berlin as tram after tram rounded a tight corner. Steel wheels pressed against the polished rails, and with the full weight of a laden tram car bearing down, they emitted a bell-like resonant tone with a rich, throaty timbre. I closed my eyes and, unbidden, I pictured large prehistoric birds calling out to one another. The living montage of the city often has such a hallucinatory effect.

Hallucinatory effects are heightened in a city such as Prague, where the Gothic is introduced to the Baroque, and then both shake hands with the 20th century. Nude torsos buttress doorways and balconies, with writhing musculature straining under the weight of so much stone, and history. Carved faces grimace and scowl, while stalagmites of masonry rise to the clouds, topped with ersatz golden suns. A veritable menagerie of animals, real and fanciful, is easily observed, gracing the façades and portals. Bears, frogs, pigs, fishes, ostriches; and lions — lots of lions — stand in noble profiles surrounded by all manner of Baroque frippery. Brutal columns and diaphanous glass surfaces block sight lines, and reflect the reverse direction, modernism in an ongoing dialog with the antique. It can be dizzying.

The trams at Karlovo náměstí (Charles Square) resound differently from those at Alexanderplatz; they are perhaps a bit sadder, more moaning than singing. Once I heard the cries of a wounded dog in the song of those rails. Combined with the the screams of the jays cavorting in the park and the low-hanging gray clouded sky, the effect was cinematic.

Riding the dvaadvacítka (the no. 22 tram) one day, I had taken a seat on the left side of the car. My head was down, I was absorbed in what I was reading. I did not much notice the man seated in front of me, but my peripheral perceptions registered that he had white hair, and wore a dark blue jacket and brown trousers. At the next stop, there was another tram, headed in the opposite direction, on the set of rails next to me. People were still getting off and on. I saw, from the corner of my eye, a man with white hair, a dark blue jacket and brown trousers, taking a seat on the other tram car just as its doors were closing. In a split second, and without real thought, I formed the idea that the man who had been sitting in front of me had stepped down off my tram, crossed over the tracks and seated himself on the tram going in the opposite direction. Questions began to form. Had he forgotten something? Had he realized he’d been going in the wrong direction? Was he lost? From these questions, stories began to form to make sense of this behavior. But then, I looked up and saw that the white-haired blue-jacketed brown-trousered man was still there, seated in front of me.

A woman stepped on with a pet carrier, and sat across from me. Suddenly I heard a radio playing. It was clearly a radio, but the broadcast was indistinct. Then it stopped. A series of mocking descending notes, a bit like derisive laughter, came from somewhere. I looked around, and could not find the source. A strange, tiny voice spoke language-like syllables, but no meaning was formed by them, and they seemed to be coming from a passenger whose lips were not moving. Then a burst of radio again. The woman with the pet carrier had an odd, telling look on her face, something between amusement and embarrassment.

I looked down and saw that there in the pet carrier, under the seat, with a little smirk on its yellow beak and a glint in its black beady eyes, was one of nature’s feathered ventriloquists, a mynah bird.

This essay was first published in Czech as Ptačí zpěv on 9 September, 2014 in HisVoice: Magazine of Alternative Music.