words are vehicles for grand-seeming ideas which need not be so grand.
do i let myself be, do i let the vines climb?
not enough.
i title this entry moon for she is the elder sister i never knew i had - the sistermother living within me who knows no origin, knows no death.
she appears to me so frequently, so infrequently; at perfect intervals, i am guided through pitch-black dirt paths deep in magical forests. bird songs act as a constant thrumming accompaniment to the madness of this journey. i will never tire of their song.
(by the way, a bird revealed to me as my absolute favorite of all birds in the fading twilight hours of rural appalachia is the gray-cheeked thrush. its song can be heard here, and i have always thought it to sound like rustling jewels when heard twinkling distantly in the forest.)
what continually reveals itself to me, in all its various forms, is my passion for gaining knowledge about Nature and her wonders. what better way to spend time but laying beneath a canopy of trees, perhaps on a bed of rocks beside rushing water, identifying the trees based on their differing bark textures, leaf shapes, and branch tendencies? every plant has a name. when i was in australia visiting what once were sacred forests of the peoples who lived there before any settlers arrived it was clear to me that each plant, each living being had a name and a personality - and whether its function be medicinal, decorative, or even toxic, the people of that region knew intimately the land on which they lived and those beings with which they shared that land. it makes perfect sense to me that i do the same here, where i live, though the parameters within which i live are so drastically different to be almost as in another world...
and still, the trees continue to tower above our heads and cluster together in forests where we humans have no choice but to succumb and cooperate. i am awed incessantly.
here we have a recurring theme of this blog, to be sure, and it goes something like this:
"holy fuck, the universe is amazing."
real talk.
funnily enough i am also becoming even more entranced with the energy of females which surround my being. the energy of that particular world of characteristics which i both posses but by which i am also not imprisoned lends itself a familiarity to music both frightening and comforting. i find myself drawn to those which may have been my sisters, may have been my neighbors, may also have been distant cousins living on opposite ends of the globe.
shaped by our own cultures and conditioned by our own communities i share with you today a few highly inspiring figures of mysterious life energy who are colored female but, again, are not at all limited by this label.
connie converse, an american singer-songwriter operating out of a brightly-lit yet dark obscurity for the better part of both her life and the time thereafter, sang with an ingenuity rarely heard in any-gendered singers of her time. perhaps it is this raw human sound i hear in her mid-atlantic voice, which is such an atypical sound to be uttering such magnificently-unique lyrics atop such lush and intricate acoustic guitar-harmonies, which draws me to play this re-issue of songs all privately-recorded (for friends) over and over and over again.
a german singer-songwriter this time; sibylle baier also lived a life of relative obscurity, musically-speaking, as the original songs which comprise colour green were not propelled into the collective consciousness until relatively recently. characterized by a voice and aesthetic steeped in the deeper end of our sensibilities, baier often appeals most to those of us seeking to venture inward in our musical experience.
i have been quite obsessed with this entire album for several months now, but i guess i'm just now getting around to mentioning it here. my apologies.
i saw her this year at moogfest, which amazingly happened right outside of my hometown, and didn't even realize what an honor it was to be in the same room as she! she has collaborated with buchla synthesizer-extraordinaire suzanne ciani but even more importantly is one of the modern generation's leading innovator of the buchla instrument series. trained classically/traditionally as a composer, smith claims to have lost touch with music and was ready to give up completely before being introduced by a neighbor to the highly-sensitive and complex system we now as the buchla 200 series. with this smith's personal and creative voice found a foothold, one stronger and more original than she had ever found before, and it is quite amazing to witness what she has created since discovering these instruments.
the kid is the latest in a series of sound experiments where fully organic sounds emerge among others whose origins are harder to pinpoint in a beautifully-woven tapestry of voice and brilliant life-energy. i really really love getting blissfully lost in the soundscapes of kaitlyn aurelia smith's making, and this song, "to feel your best," sounds rather like the sounds one would hear in an alien forest while either tripping or traveling through life-bearing galaxies in the far-off.
... which reminds me of another album composed/improvised upon by a female artist. i haven't been able to listen to hardly anything else but this either for quite a while now~
it's fairly obvious that ciani has done more for the exploration of buchla's potential as a musical instrument and a compositional device than almost anyone else alive - and to think that this gem was recorded 30 years ago! i saw her live at moogfest this year as well and can say with confidence that she lives and breathes this instrument with such an impressive ease that the experience is akin to watching an expert dancer flow seamlessly and beautifully in time and space. in thinking about and listening to this record, which contains two separate improvised sets, i'm often struck with a feeling of isolation as though orbiting in space from miles and miles above the earth's surface in some sort of isolation unit. strangely enough, however, this isolation leads not to melancholy but a warm kinship with some deeper and greater force which exists outside of my human mind's comprehension. i feel the universe's cold and unfeeling embrace (as paradoxical as it may sound) for the very harmonies we hear ciani play with, which are indeed familiar to us mortals as we have been conditioned to enjoy harmonious music for countless centuries, are produced using technologies and systems almost too fantastical to be considered mere "instruments" - if mathematics, as a whole, were to sing, would ciani be considered to be in intimate contact with this ancient and timeless machine?
you be the judge. :D
bringing this circle of utterly-unique female sound-energy around to rural niger, fatou deidi ghali of the increasingly-popular female rock group les filles de illighadad gives us a private acoustic performance of what it might sound like for a musically-inclined nigerian villager such as herself to pick up an acoustic guitar and play a unique blend of blues and folksong that strikes me of delta blues and indian raga, and much more. wherever the exact roots of such a music lie (it may be impossible to say), i am forever taken by this woman's rawness, as well as the organically-interwoven melody of her synchronous voice and guitar playing.
the soul lives on!
