OEI: AURAL POETICS
OEI #98-99: Aural Poetics (368 pages), edited by Michael Nardone
“The domain of the aural opens, at once, on to the act of composition and on to the iterative context of a composition’s reception; it comprises embodiment(s) imbricated with an array of inscriptive practices. The works of these pages instantiate (as compositions) and contemplate (as critical texts) the differing degrees in which techniques of the body enter into dynamic relation with modes of inscription, forming a feedback loop that co-constitutes their capacities. To this degree, an aural poetics – in opposition to the vast discourse of its homonym – can evade the facile separation of an essentialized “oral” and “written,” veer away from the technological determinism and psychosocial developmental model that commentators have grafted upon this faux binary, and compel us to imagine and examine composition across artistic practices through assessing specific articulations of materials and occasion. Here, listening is manifold.” (Michael Nardone)
With contributions by:
Raven Chacon, Lisa Robertson, Cecilia Vicuña, Dylan Robinson, Constance DeJong, Eyvind Kang, Gail Scott, JJJJJerome Ellis, Damon Krukowski, Candice Hopkins + Raven Chacon, Merlin Sheldrake, Amber Rose Johnson, John Melillo, Heather Davis, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Diane Glancy, Janel Morin + Peter Morin, Niiqo Pam Dick, Oana Avasilichioaei, Sophie Seita, Ame Henderson + Evan Webber, Patrick Nickleson, Dalie Giroux, Simon Brown, Dalie Giroux + François Lemieux, Mitchell Akiyama, Carolyn Chen + Divya Victor, Michael Nardone, Marshall Trammell, Luke Nickel, Lauren (Lou) Turner, Valéria Bonafé + Lílian Campesato, Nicholas Komodore, Lewis Freedman, Tiziana La Melia + Ellis Sam, Ida Marie Hede + Steven Zultanski, Alexandre St-Onge, Danny Snelson, Brent Cox + Courtlin Byrd, Raymond Boisjoly, Max Ritts, Steven Feld + Xenia Benivolski, Tom Miller, Daniel Borzutsky, Anne Bourne, and Marcus Boon.
To order copies, please write: bildred [at] oei [dot] nu
Copies in the UK are available via Good Press in Glasgow and other local bookshops.
Sophie Seita, ‘A Laboratory of Sensations: Listening for Texture’ (extract below; full text available as a pdf here.)
Sometimes peeling a pomegranate can sound like the crackling of a small fire. Or glass spinning. Or the universe exploding.
How do we listen for texture? Normally when we think of texture, we think of something we can touch—something haptic or visual, definitely something external to us, like a chenille or corduroy cushion, where we either sense or see how much the material might give. To listen for texture means to de-emphasise a dominant sensorial system over others. Can one sense gain some qualities of another and undo the senses’ strict separation? How do we create frisky synaesthetic intermingling? Suddenly texture is also inside us. It can’t be seen or touched but felt. To listen for texture also qualifies what ‘hearing’ might mean.
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At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, I witnessed a digital performance and somatic video work by the Montréal-based choreographer Hanna Sybille Müller and the dancer and poet Erin Robinsong—one that indirectly digested these questions and provocations, or rather allowed me to digest them. First presented in various live performances as part of their research process, Polymorphic Microbe Bodies was reconceived as a ‘somatic video’ with a small in-person audience for Tangente Danse in Montréal in April 2021. The video was then edited and screened online for a week with binaural sound; that is, sound that was recorded and edited spatially to create a three-dimensional feeling as if you were in the room. Digital audiences were encouraged to listen with headphones to immerse themselves in this ambient sonic scenery.
The artists describe the piece as ‘a laboratory of sensations’, in which ‘the audience is choreographed by the experience’. The work sends us on a journey into the textures, fissures, and juices of matter and bodies, but also engages a broader theoretical discourse on microbial existence, thinking about the cohabitation of multiple species in our bodies, down to germs, bacteria, and viruses. Inspired by microbial research and the recognition that our bodies are in fact home to multispecies communities, are that community, are explicitly not an individual, Erin and Sybille became interested in exploring how we feel internal multiplicity. How can we translate this research while also having an embodied understanding of it? We have strangers living inside of us, Donna Haraway reminds us: ‘I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many.’
I asked myself, if I were to write the closed captions for this piece, what imaginative descriptive language can capture this sonic and embodied landscape that I experienced? Suddenly this inquiry into texture became a problem of translation.
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Sound is gestural. It’s a doing. And sometimes that doing is only imagined.
Sound of chewing, saliva, someone eating with an open mouth.
Sound of bare feet on the floor. Sound of shuffling and objects being dragged. The sound of things being readied.
Sound of fabric brushing against skin. Sound of roughness. Like clearing your throat. Sound of a criss-cross pattern.
Do these sounds make me want to move my legs?
Sound of a spoon being dropped on a wooden table.
I become aware of my dry mouth.
Sound of grapes being slipped into a jar full of undefined liquids.
What do I pay attention to?
Scrubbing, scribbling, squeaking. Sound of things getting too much, we want them gone! We want to rub them off our bodies, get them out of our head!
Sound of feeling swayed, that suspension of gravity, as if you were sitting on a swing, sound of feeling the wind brush your ears, make your hair wild.
Sound of the condensation of all your doubts, all your frustrations, into a little ball of light, shimmering away, firing sparks.
Sound of plates being moved around. Sound of the yawn of a tree. Sound of sleepy-sloppy limbs relaxing into cacophonous cushions. Sound of serene alertness.
My critical mind pipes up again tugging on the serenity-strings. Can I really use this definitional language ‘sound of’ with its apparent claim to universality? Should it be ‘My sound of’ or ‘I hear’ or ‘I sense’? And what are cacophonous cushions? I think it’s what my singing teacher meant when she said ‘step into a roaring silence’. Stepping into that paradox means becoming aware of that raucous orchestra inside you. Try it. It’s wild.
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