This is noise, but the opposite of harsh noise

My first appearance on a compilation, and my second release under the name Riyv Ba’Ir.

Biosphere ‎– Substrata²
Black Dice ‎– Beaches & Canyons
Caul – Crucible
Certain Beyond All Reasonable Doubt ‎– Live Berlin 98
Divination ‎– Distill
Earth ‎– Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version
Earth ‎– Extra-Capsular Extraction
Final ‎– 2
Fuck Buttons ‎– Street Horrrsing
Godspeed You Black Emperor! ‎– Slow Riot For New Zerø Kanada
Tim Hecker ‎– Harmony In Ultraviolet
KTL ‎– 2
Labradford ‎– A Stable Reference
Labradford ‎– Fixed::Context
Lull ‎– Continue
Lull ‎– Like A Slow River
Lull ‎– Moments
Nick Parkin ‎– Island Of Dust
Paul Schütze • Andrew Hulme ‎– Fell
The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-la-la Band – Born Into Trouble As The Sparks Fly Upward.
Sunn O))) ‎– Monoliths & Dimensions
Takehisa Kosugi ‎– Catch-Wave
Time Machines ‎– Time Machines
Vir Unis ‎– The Drift Inside
Vir Unis ‎– Aeonian Glow
Various Artists – Folds And Rhizomes For Gilles Deleuze

Sacred drone pointing toward and resulting from desert experiences, emptying, refining fire, repentance, restoration.

Crowd field recording in “Restoration” courtesy Freesound.org user dkustic: www.freesound.org/people/dkustic/sounds/76139/

CD-R Release forthcoming.

Amma Syncletica said, “There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town; they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd; and it is possible for those who are solitaries to live in the crowd of their own thoughts.”

The feminism I came into is one that is concerned with the rights, voices and safety of sex workers. That includes the right to and practice of self-determination. Yeah, a slave-owning pimp infringes upon those rights, silences those voice and provides no real safety. The idea that sex-workers need some sort of rescuing (almost always by affluent white folks) can do the same.

It was with great satisfaction that I saw some of my concerns being reflected and expanded in Are Evangelicals Monopolizing, Misleading US Anti-Trafficking Efforts?, an interview with professor of Christian Ethics, Yvonne Zimmerman, as well as in Chink in the Evangelical wall: Sex trafficking, colonialism and Christian ethics from “The Naked Anthropologist,” Dr. Laura Agustín. They are both worth your time, and deserve to be read widely in evangelical circles.

Rev. King was killed in Memphis while he was there supporting the sanitation workers who were striking. I walked out my front door today to see the rows of emptied trash bins, evidence that while I was sleeping in, the sanitation workers in my town were up long before dawn, working. People are at work right now, making nowhere near a living wage at WalMart, Burger King, gas stations, coffee shops, hotels, janitorial services and nearly every retail or service industry job, while a handful of us rest. Or worse, shop.

The president is being sworn in today with his hands on Dr. King’s Bible. Dr. Cornel West expresses everything that is wrong with that, and does it far better than I can.

So we celebrate the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by letting a privileged few off work while those who labor and still make poverty wages are ignored. We celebrate King’s agitation for peace by having the leader of the world’s largest killing force, a man who murders by order and by robot, falsely associate himself with King’s vision and King’s faith by placing his hands on the Rev. King’s Bible.

We do nothing to stop war. We do nothing to end poverty. We ignore the basic humanity of people near and far. Yet we can feel good about ourselves, because there’s a day on the calendar to honor a man who did all the work that we refuse to.

God bless Martin Luther King, Jr. May his legacy never die and his words never fall silent. God damn the empty holiday that bears his name.

Originally intended to dispute the biology-is-destiny formulation, the distinction between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence, gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex. The unity of the subject is thus already potentially contested by the distinction that permits of gender as a multiple interpretation of sex.

If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in anyone way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself owes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.

This radical splitting of the gendered subject poses yet another set of problems. Can we refer to a “given” sex or a “given” gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is “sex” anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such “facts” for us? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and social interests? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distincton at all.

It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. This construction of “sex” as the radically unconstructed will concern us again in the discussion of Levi-Strauss and structuralism in chapter 2. At this juncture it is already clear that one way the internal stability and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality of sex in a prediscursive domain. This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, pp 9-11

It’s been fascinating, getting into the different sounds, seeing what directions I go. Below, you’ll find my last song of 2012, “Unknowing,” and my first song of 2013, tentatively titled “Spacebient01.” I hope you enjoy.

A common phrase used in transgender 101 posts is “gender identity,” getting at the idea that gender is an internal thing. However, it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s not just socially constructed (which says nothing about gender “not being real”, which is how “socially constructed” is often taken to mean). Gender is semiotic, a hermeneutic process, like a vast tree of languages. It’s personal, relational, and cultural. It’s as much about how we relate to our surrounding world and society as it is about our inner sense of self or our relation to our bodies. “Man/male” and “woman/female” are some of the most common languages, with plenty of variations like “femme” or “butch” [which isn't restricted to men or women either!], or “dialects” or “accents” if you will. Our [Western] culture only socially sanctions “man/male” and “woman/female” language, but some of us “speak” our gender differently; for example, I am agender, genderless. While I “understand” gender, I don’t “speak” it natively, if you understand this metaphor (I’ll do a post on this later; it actually took a while to figure this out, namely when I went on testosterone).

Emphasis mine.

What we do is pretend that we have hope, and joy, and love. What we yearn for is what stands under those names. Hope and joy and love, but which we dare not hope for. Advent is a time when we have a chance, if we want to take the chance, of getting in touch with what we deeply yearn for and do not have. We live in a culture of optimism, that thinks that things are going to turn out well, and yet we know in spite of all of that that things do not, in fact, turn out well. We all die. We all experience disappointment, destruction in our personal and familial lives. And yet we think that’s the way things are. We console ourselves with that is what is part of our life, part of reality.

I think one of the things that Jesus does when he comes into Gallilee preaching and goes ultimately to Jerusalem is to tell people not to take reality lying down. Not to take what is real, what is actual, what is possible, what is factual as what is given, but to awake in them this wild, crazy desire. Yearning, which is always already there, for that which is impossible. For bodies to be healed. For the brokenness to be brought into wholeness. For the disasters of our world to turn into actual peace.

And Advent is a time when we can say “That’s not enough. That’s not good enough. That’s not REAL enough. What we want is something that far exceeds what is within our grasp, what is within our experience.” It is only if we really enter into Advent that we can be surprised, astonished, blown away by the coming of that which so far exceeds what is possible, what is programmable that we can actually break loose in tongues, in rejoicing, in rejoicing that has no words.

There are those who are poor, who are broken, who are destroyed everyday who can sing and sigh and yearn, “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” Can we? Dare we? That is the challenge and the promise of Advent.

There is an element of irreducible indeterminacy and instability built right into creation, so that creation is going to be continually exposed to re-creation. What God has formed is able both to come unformed, to break down or come unstrung – that is the bad news, the downside of the risk – but by the same token and for the same reason, things are also able to be reformed, reconfigured, and reinvented, which is the upside, the more creative and re-creative side in things. There is a deep structural mutability and transformability inscribed in things by these narratives that works both ways, which is what we mean by a risk. It can undo the best-laid plans of God and humankind, even as it keeps the future open. Things are deconstructible just because they are constructed from a mutable stuff to begin with. That is why life is a risky if bracing business, and why the Talmudic author points to the “radical uncertainty” in things, while God is keeping the divine fingers crossed, hoping that it all works.

John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God, p. 64

The first is “The Trees Themselves Are Marching,” a rhythmic noise piece that’s sourced from a small tree in my front yard. It was lots of fun learning how to “play” the tree, finding the different sounds I could get out of it, and how to find a (mostly) consistent beat.

The second song, “Ride ‘Round Back,” is a 30-minute noisy drone piece that I sourced from my bicycle (a sweet, single-speed Schwinn cruiser) and some feedback (the contact mic allows for some really cool feedback).

I hope you listen and enjoy. I’m having a blast with this stuff. So many ideas for future works!

Lyrics behind the cut.

SECESSION

Their genocidal war is declared—we declare our secession
And suffer reprisals, proscription, arrests
Like our brothers and sisters in cell blocks, on shopfloors, in cages
We’re marked for death
They buy, sell, and enslave us
We break from their mazes
They starve out escapees, gut our hearts, cut our ties
We sow seeds and bear fruit
They clearcut and uproot
We survive
We thrive

Bridges are for burning, as tables are for turning
And nothing they offer could ever ease this yearning
Better wounds than regrets, better doomed than suppressed
But we’re not doomed just yet
We are sparks in the night
In this empire of ice
We set fires in the streets and the hearts of their young
They destroy and devour
But we’ll heal all the damage they’ve done
And when we shatter their silence
And they answer with violence
We’ll dance in the shackles and sing through the trial
They are banking on death
But we’ll outlive them yet
Though they’ve bulldozed our heartlands
And brainwashed our families
And poisoned our passions
And smothered all hope from our souls

We survive

DELIVERANCE

One escapes—a boy won’t go back
I did my time in the prison you call life
In spite of surveillance, the judgmental eyes
Defying the lies that there’s nothing outside
One escapes
From landscapes laid waste by your toil
From cities that run on your blood, sweat, and tears
Come workers—desert
Come soldiers—desert
Come, life is for living, not living in fear
What chain chokes your throat, what gate bars your path
What prison entombs you in concrete and stone
What fence stays your step save the one you accept
What key could release you from walls of your own

No—this girl won’t go back
The older I get, the more I want to fight
To destroy institutions, for total revolution
No compromise, it’s my fucking life
Fight—for each inch of ground
For each hour untrammeled, for every wrist bound
For songs yet unsung, desires unrealized
For all of the ones who should be at our sides
Don’t go back
No don’t fear, don’t relent, don’t back down
Don’t falter, don’t turn away now
No wealth could replace the riches we forfeit
Nor monuments ransom the chances we waste
None will even recall what we squandered at all
If we never dare to give wings to our longings
If we never dare to give teeth to our rage

Do you remember what I said?
I wouldn’t take away a word
Better die in defeat, starved, crazed, and alone
Far from this or any herd
No law can give freedom, no state can give power
No wages can buy back the life that we sell
No god can grant grace in this forsaken place
We have to storm heaven and seize them ourselves

Storm heaven
Unleash hell

PAUPER KINGS/BANDIT QUEENS

These are the power-mad fever dreams of pauper kings
We have nothing—we must be everything
We are masters without slaves, gods who need no worshipping
Through the gutters and galaxies that are reserved for madmen’s eyes
We sail, like rain against the sky

In the ruins
In encampments fit for bandit queens
In the glow at the end of the day
We will gather with our demons
We will dance, and they will play
Through the gutters and galaxies that are reserved for madmen’s eyes
The damned steal through the land of the blessed
To taste the sweet fruit of the flesh

When the others lose hope
When the bread runs out
When there’s nowhere to go
When the hammer comes down
We look to the horizon, and all our sufferings lose their sting
Toast the beheaded, sing: behead every boasted king
We will bear neither chain nor crown
Neither chain nor crown

Meanwhile, ever present, inexorable doom
Sense your death—there it waits, inside you
Another day of borrowed time
Could it be long enough to taste of life

KICK TILL IT BREAKS

Absence of pleasure, absence of pain
And day after day after day is the same
Absence of feeling, absence of hope
An absence, a vacuum that smothers, that chokes
But whatever it takes, whatever it takes
You’ll empty everything into that pit
Whatever it takes, whatever it takes
You’ll concede and conform till you cease to exist

Where there’s nothing to live for, there’s nothing to lose
And there’s no consolation we cannot refuse
Where there’s nothing to lose there is nothing to fear
We would risk losing nothing to get out of here
And whatever it takes, whatever it takes
We’ll hijack and pilot our lives out of the void
Whatever it takes, whatever it takes
We’ll smash through this silence, we’ll kick till it breaks

THE BORDER

A wind bears your scent to those in pursuit
There will be no rest tonight
At your back the world you fled, gaining on you
And ahead only the darkness and the fight
But you know you’re not really living
Until you’re sharing every breath of air with death
You’re not really giving
Until you separate yourself from the rest

You’ve come far
Just to find this
Almost encircled
Another victim
No longer yourself
Not yet anything else
Beyond recognition
Beyond return
Hunted, haunted from without and within
You arrive at the edge of the night
Searching for the strength to push yourself
To the place where limits end
You feel the future in chains within you
And a new sun that rises before you
Can you cross over
Can you reach
The farthest shore
The steepest cliff
The starkest wasteland
The deepest rift
The border

If you have a limit
A point of no return
And you have reached it
And all your bridges are burned
The sleeping armies are stirring
You’re not alone on this path
The war is on, the lines are drawn
And there is no turning back
There is no turning back

in darkness

DEFEAT

Ash
Cinders
Use it all up, burn it all down, just don’t let them take you alive

To live in resistance—that means to give up
Each day’s bread for action, each night’s sleep for dreams
To hang by a thread in the vacuum
Between what is and what is to be
To lose
Fight after fight, with no rest or respite
And to win back the chance to take risks, to take flight
The stakes that place life beyond price

Yes we walk in darkness
Under ten thousand stars
We embrace our desires
Even as they are torn from our arms
That agony—that is our triumph
That failure—that is our feat
We are nothing and no one, fed on wanting alone
And in wanting we’re almost complete

We arrive here embattled, pursued and forlorn
Rich in stories that cannot be told or be borne
There’s so much I still want to say, want to do
And I know I won’t be here for long
To fight
Loss after loss, cost upon cost
And in the settling dust
The aftermath and despair
To pick up the pieces and set out once again from there

Yes we walked in the darkness
Under ten thousand stars
And awoke lost in deserts
There we trembled and paused
We were dragged by our demons
Through hell and heaven above
We wanted so badly to love life so madly
That wanting was almost enough
And though when we arrived, almost nothing remained
Of the visions that had guided us over horizons
And all destinations seemed foreign and strange
That agony—that is our triumph
That failure—that is our feat
We’ve raised anchor forever
The world lies in our wake
And that ache
There is nothing so sweet

While the plate was passed for the offering the image below was projected up onto the wall, I assume as a reminder that there are companies who aren’t trying to have people killed for being gay.

The image, and the idea behind it, just don’t sit well with me. You can see HRC’s criteria for their Corporate Equality Index here. That’s the list of things they use to determine if a company is “pro-gay” as described in the above image.

But there’s so much that they leave out. Coca-Cola may have wonderfully inclusive insurance, and they may include orientation and identity protections in their hiring procedures, but they also have a history of murdered union workers in their bottling plants in central America. What does it matter if they won’t discriminate against you for being gay if they’re just going to have you killed for demanding safe working conditions and fair wages. Their corporate headquarters may be a great place for LGBT people to work, but I’d bet those plants are not.

The same can be said of the factories that produce Apple products, Nike’s sweatshops, Gap’s sweatshops and Hershey’s child-slave farmed chocolate. Even here in the US, Starbucks has a history of union busting. Those are just the ones I knew about off the top of my head!

Hiring practices and sponsoring Pride parades don’t mean jack when you’re mistreating and killing your employees. You can’t be pro-gay and pro-slavery. Queer people are slaves. Queer people are union organizers. Queer people are textile workers in sweatshops.

Playing nice in the public eye doesn’t make you “pro-gay,” not when your murder, exploitation, slavery and unfair business practices affect queer employees and their families. You can’t be “pro-gay” when you’re anti-human.

There’s something powerful about sharing our stories and speaking from experience. About releasing what, until moments ago, was an unspoken secret. To let it go. To take it out into the open and inspect it.

Brian Gerald Murphy

I have a story to be told. It’s one of pain and determination and fear and abuse and, at the time, love, though I have a hard time believing that now. It’s a story of being trapped, of being powerless in the worst way. A story of constant threat, of being used. It’s a story of trying to save someone who was trying to destroy me. It’s a story of hope destroyed, of humiliation and of wounds that just haven’t fully healed, and probably never will.

It’s a story that’s pivotal in my becoming who I am. It’s a story that shaped how I relate to others. It’s a story that, in some ways, moved my queerness from theoretical to actual.

I hope I can share that story one day, openly. But for now it’s too frightening, both to revisit those days in my heart and to open myself up to the barbs of those who will judge me for it.

It’s a story I don’t want anymore. It’s a story I want to let go.

The only response I could give was “The foundation is no foundation.”

“An empty shell!” The charge rang out. “If there is no foundation, the belief system is an empty shell.”

I know I sounded like I was spouting some sort of koan, and I know that many reading that discussion felt as though I was, along with others, dodging the questions. There was no dodging, and if an empty shell I inhabit, then so be it. But what some see as emptiness, I experience as space made for relationship.

The foundation is no foundation.

For a belief system to be solid, they say, it must have a solid foundation, a reality on which all else is predicated. We have to be practical, they say, and practicality dictates that to build anything that will last, one must build on solid ground. The wise build their houses on solid rock!

But no rock is solid. Looking within, even the most solid of rock is made up of smaller pieces, and those of bits smaller still, between which are vast swaths of nothingness. Emptiness, one might say, like the shell named earlier. Looking downward, the rock sits upon something else, which sits upon something else, which sits upon the flowing, molten core of the planet, which spins and turns in space. More emptiness.

A foundation cannot be an ultimate starting point upon which everything else is built, because what’s called a foundation is always atop something else. There is no ultimate base. Anything named as “the foundation” must have a foundation of its own. It’s simply turtles all the way down. The foundation is no foundation at all. It may be a link or an interface, but any solid rock is ultimately sand and empty space.

Instead of a foundation, my “belief system” has a series of relationships. I do not base my faith on the resurrection, nor on the Exodus, nor on church tradition, nor on any of the solas. Instead I relate to each of them, and they to each other. In this way I relate to the Trinity. As with any relationship, it is ever changing. The faith of no foundation is not a once and for all declaring, but a living, with all its uncertainty. It is a trust in relationship, be it the relationship between beliefs, doctrines, history, experience, tradition, etc. or the relationship between people. No one is greater than the other. They hold each other together, constantly looking to one another for strength.

To flip a hymn on its head:

On Christ’s wind-blown dunes I stand,
All that looks like rock is surely sand.

The foundation is no foundation. It’s something much stronger than that.

Jesus in his solidarity with the marginal ones is moved to compassion. Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness. In the arrangement of “lawfulness” in Jesus’ time, as in the ancient empire of Pharaoh, the one unpermitted quality of relation was compassion. Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion. The norms of law (social control) are never accommodated to persons, but persons are accommodated to the norms. Otherwise the norms will collapse and with them the whole power arrangement. Thus the compassion of Jesus is to be understood not simply as a personal emotional reaction but as a public criticism in which he dares to act upon his concern against the entire numbness of his social context. Empires live by numbness. Empires, in their militarism, expect numbness about the human cost of war. Corporate economies expect blindness to the cost in terms of poverty and exploitation. Governments and societies of domination go to great lengths to keep the numbness intact. Jesus penetrates the numbness by his compassion and with his compassion takes the first step by making visible the odd abnormality that had become business as usual. Thus compassion that might be seen simply as generous goodwill is in fact criticism of the system, forces, and ideologies that produce the hurt.

~ Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination pp. 88-89