again with the liner notes:

Sound As Ruminant

OR

Seagrass Grazing

Some make plenty of goats and cattles having multiple stomachs whereby they chew and rechew their cud. Reducing grass to something digestible.

The big wide world of human culture seeks to impress upon us all how much we need the ministrations of intercessors who will read and understand things for we mortals. To accept this wholesale is to put one at the feet of the master interpreters. To fight this and question it at every turn is to embrace a dodgy sort of anti-intellectualism and general paranoia.

Sadly, we must learn how and when to question. And to trust. And it seems a function of slender alliances political and otherwise and in any case both nuanced and murky to be human and connect with others around us, um, somehow.

So art and its ambiguities are meant to temper our minds and limber up our dispositions. Even as we get older and in various circumstances painted into our respective corners. I try to collaborate as often as I can, but find I do best to keep a distance from others who have their own cherished notions and ways of doing things and things to do. It’s best I do whatever I can do on my own terms and then contribute whatever that others might find of use. This is my own odd blend of humility and bloodymindedness.

So we graze and gather and chew and chew again. We give whatever we can offer out of such singular processes.

I’m sorry to admit my best is all I have to offer. And my best often comes from me, not from me and others looking to monitor or correct or supervise what I do or offer up. So many who I admire as artists and curators I keep a healthy distance from, since whether or not they can show the same humility and self awareness of their limits, they do have limits. See them or not, so do I. And find the blinkered asymmetries of our interactions vexing. In so far as my own awareness fails to be or correct my shortcomings, it likely vexes others. So do we respect and like and need one another. And we drive each other a bit crazy.

Someone I had the worst time with at one temp job was a writer who I respected as an artist also a person who had endured crap aplenty. The writer and I were likely a bit too much alike not to bother one another. Only those who annoyed me with their failures alone bothered me more overall. However wise such people wanted to be, folly and the pain of folly was all they had to offer. There was no “other hand” to be on.

However social music is etc, I like “noise” which might be too squiggly to be “harsh wall”, too drony not to be drone adjacent, too untonal and unmelodic to end up being music after all. Always a bit clueless about genres and now too old to care about adherence to such, I just make noise. Not noisy enough? Too bad. Not musical enough? Other choices abound, go find them, now. (A more involved way of again saying “Too bad!”) So whether it’s Vivaldi piped in to annoy and push away teenagers or Sweet played in supermarkets to remind us aging folk that we were kids once, music seems always to have its tribe, or anti-tribe (brings to mind old story of Jello Biafra about how touring DK playing Heino between sets annoyed European punks – makes me smile). At the squire’s dance in early 19th century England, period movies always have the dancers in a perfect mesh and weaving.

But noise weaves whatever and not to be the soundtrack of anyone’s life nor to organize motions (thinking now of John Cage and Merce Cunningham working together separately, music and dance in happenstance cohabitations of space). So however much we need or crave one another in some perfect togetherness, noise is not meant to serve square dance callers nor pep rallies chants. So noise is meant only to bring us toward the world. And Cagean and post Cagean folk might observe the sounds around us already await our attention. Yeah, noise making is not an inevitable thing. Nor are apples nor apple blossoms. Yet here we come.

Chewing and rechewing, we graze our best.