Hello again, a lot of life, music and movement on this side. Processing in the dissociative springtime sunshine.
(photo credit Felix Brüggemann)
It's funny how a handful of objects make you feel at home. A sensitive handwritten "happy birthday sweetie" or a shard of wood made meaningful by an artist carpenter friend in Detroit. A pyramid of marble lazily picked up at a Berlin Flohmarkt, or a pack of Papier d'Armenie incense, the smell triggering sensuality, a simultaneous embrace and disgust of 'femininity’. Some larger things like wieldy T&A Criterion speakers and a Denon amp (like the actress in Play It As It Lays who had to bring her hifi to the desert). A driver's manual and postcards found in the violin case I've not opened for fifteen years. Photos, sweetgrass, a strap once gifted and never worn.
It's hard to understand movement (moving and travel), and how, when done frequently, it changes you over time, increasingly rendering concepts like home or solid ground both desirable and impossible. But as they say, it's not about the destination, it's the journey! The journey of journaling. The journey of arriving and becoming someone else. All day planes and overnight trains. I'm sorry but there is nothing I can do as we are Fully Booked. The family with loud children in the quiet car, that one German who will always insist you've sat in their seat, and in doing so, done something wrong (sorry Germany but I will not miss the verb dürfen). Trains of people crying and unsure where to go. Eerily empty cars. Trains going in the right or wrong direction. Always and without fail that one person without a mask, coughing like they're alone, this chindiapered plague-positive angel doesn't have to test or stay home because obviously the rules don't apply to them and their airborne aura. Who really cares, can we just get on with life already, there's other issues, *cough*.
I am never not amused by the absent language surrounding movement in these transport hubs. Investment firms and instruments, transport services and solutions. Like Maersk advertisements deadpanning "there is another side to logistics" – what is this sentence, even? A banal, mysterious and smooth phrase, enveloping and quite literally packing the physical and virtual acts of movement: of goods, people, contracts, invoices, plane and train tickets, gas money, visas, miscellaneous items, personal possessions away at sea for months at a time, goodbyes that potentially become forever. Transport hubs are already emotionally fraught enough without this repulsive language around moving and movement, this flattening of distinction between people and objects and the brutal act of their displacement. I imagine a well-read advertising executive in Copenhagen rather pleased with themselves, savoring the sentence’s transgressive contour.
It's important for me to emphasize how relatively easy it is for me to move around, especially against the current backdrop. There's been restrictions, sure. Re-applying for German residency and being met with the final boss of the Ausländerbehörde, about to jump out of her skin because I had the audacity to put my documents in order in a binder. Finding any hole to poke in my airtight application, it was just an unlucky meeting, a meeting that altered the course of things. The fear I felt from being inside this most abjectly nowhere fluorescent lit space for hours on end: feeling echoes of deportation, statelessness, permanent entry bans, and the untold numbers of unambiguous separations.
On this note, I want to raise awareness around this fundraiser project by Crack Magazine - I provided some piano sounds, alongside a number of samples and loops by other artists. Go download and support if you can. All proceeds from the project will be donated to the Disaster Emergency Committee’s (DEC) Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal, which is providing urgent aid to people impacted by Russia’s war against Ukraine.
You can also show support to the team of Kiev-based cultural organization K41 here, and a working list of humanitarian organizations providing aid and relief can be found here.
(𝜏ɾαɳട𝓶ιടടισɳട)
Awe is something you feel when confronted with forces beyond your control: nature, the cosmos, chaos, human error, hallucinations.
Here are the latest editions of Awe.
Awe w/ Laurel Halo & Kode9 - 17 March 2022
Awe w/ Laurel Halo - 7 February 2022
Awe w/ Laurel Halo - 10 January 2022
Finally, re-emerging this spring with a small run of live and dj performances:
25.03 → London, UK → Tate Modern / Tate Lates (ambient dj pres. by Global Roots)
16.04 → Paris, FR → Présences électronique (presenting new live multichannel work)
21.04 → Lausanne, CH → Église Saint-François (live)
04.05 → Köln, DE → Kölner Philharmonie (live, opening for Midori Takada)
12.05 → Basel, CH → Kaserne (live)
20.05 → Brussels, BE → Heartbroken (dj)
21.05 → Zürich, CH → Zukunft (dj)
(𝓵ⲓ𝓯ⲉ, ⲃⲁ𝓵ⲁⲛⲥⲉ)
Currently digesting the Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, McCoy Tyner's Expansions and the floating soothing worlds of Apichatpong Weerasekathul.
Thanks for reading, thanks nochmal für Ihre Unterstützung et votre compréhension.
L.H