“For more than 30 years the Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the world’s intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations.”

The Conet Project

Thank you Sara Veglahn for introducing me to these! This is my ideal soundscape.

This is my August Muxtape Mix.

The tracks are:
Gertrude Stein, Interview
Dorothea Lasky, Some People Do It
John Cage, from Silence
Sawako Nakayasu, Texture Notes: Texture of a Conductor
Barbara Guest, Windy Afternoon
John Yau, Russian Letter
Peter Gizzi, Masters of the Cante Jondo
CAConrad - distorted torque of FLORA’S red [from (Soma)tic Midge]
Eileen Myles, Maxfield Parrish
Joe Brainard, Vincent Van Gogh
Grace Paley, Living
Lesley Yalen, from This Elizabeth

Bhanu Kapil discusses The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

Me reading Rebecca’s poem Caught in the Maw

Rebecca reading some poems from Tuned Droves

This is my July Muxtape Mix.

The tracks are:
Alice Notley, All My Life
Tomaz Salamun, Red Flowers
Nicole Brossard, Si Ceci est Mal
Bhanu Kapil, from Autobiography of a Cyborg
Bernadette Mayer, from Studying Hunger
Dorothea Lasky, Two Assholes
Lorine Niedecker
Susan Howe & Dave Grubbs, Thorow - Part One
Nathaniel Mackey, from Atet A.D.
Lucky Dragons, Schjeldahl’s Party

I like using muxtape for poetry recordings because you can just let it play and loop all day. Is anyone else using this for poetry mixes? I’d like to know about it if you are. It’s pretty fast and easy to use.

Bhanu Kapil reads from “Incubation: A Space for Monsters” and “Humanimal: A Project for Future Children”

“Am I alive? Am I alive now? I am alive.”-BK

Jesse Seldess reads Hum With from his book Who Opens (Kenning Editions).

Dear Jesse, I like the hiss behind your voice.

Moten Lecture

Currently looping/listening to this.

Bird in Snow

This discussion between Steve Evans and Al Filreis raises so many important questions about audio files, scholarship, and pedagogy. I would really like to segment and annotate parts of this soon. This is worth downloading. Please listen to it.

Dorothea Lasky & Thom Donovan read their collaboration Deadpan.

I met and became friends with Ryan Eckes when I lived in Philadelphia. What I like about Ryan’s poems is the way they often drift between concrete physical landscapes and language as its own landscape, and between humility and harshness. I re-read Ryan’s chapbook the other day while taking a bath and I ended up reading the whole thing until my skin got all prune-y.

Ryan Eckes comments on his poems

Ryan reading some poems:
Paying Respects

Out The Window

Stolen Car

Bhagavad-CVS

PhillySound feature on Ryan

Ryan’s chapbook when i come here

New MP3’s picked by Danny Snelson.

I really like the Darren Wershler-Henry recording.

C.D. Wright reads all of Deepstep Come Shining

Alvin Lucier’s The Only Talking Machine of its Kind in the World (for speaker and tape-delay system)

LINK to page on UBUweb

Performers:
Chris Cogburn - speaker
Christopher Burns - computer and electronics
Matt Ingalls - computer and electronics

The Score:
Alvin Lucier - “The Only Talking Machine of Its Kind in the World” for any stutterer, stammerer, lisper, person with faulty or halting speech, regional dialect or foreign accent or any other anxious speaker who believes in the healing power of sound (1969)

“Ask friends to design a tape-delay system in the form of a totem pole, mandala, labyrinth, tree or any other visual configuration. Talk to an audience through a public address system for a long enough time to reveal the peculiarities of your speech. After the peculiarities of your speech have been revealed, your friends may begin building the tape-delay system into which your speech, tapped from the public address system, is fed. Talk, during the building of the tape-delay system, about that which will best reveal the peculiarities of your speech; but from time to time read from a text or tell a story of a people, real or imagined, who have not had or do not now have any idea about anxious speech. Continue talking after the completion of the tape-delay system until, due to the annihilation of the peculiarities of your speech by the tape-delay system, anxiety about your speech is relieved or it becomes clear that the tape-delay system is failing and will continue to fail to bring this about.”

Juliana Spahr reading Thrashing Seems Crazy

This is a recording of Nathaniel Mackey reading from Will Alexander’s Letters to Rosa. Some excerpts of this project appear in Chain #6.

This is Nathaniel Mackey reading from his first epistolary novel Bedouin Hornbook. It is one of my favorite recordings of anything ever. I remember listening to this recording in the late 90’s and turning around a corner in my apartment just as Mackey read the phrase “Dear Birds” about halfway through. It was a physical sensation of being “hit” by something, of hearing something that was very important to hear but I didn’t know why. I had ordered the cassette from SFSU and I remember being excited that my cassette deck had an endless repeat function. I think this one looped all day and night long. (The other side was this John Taggart reading.) I would walk in and out of the room and catch different parts of it. There were several minutes of silence at the end of each side, and I remember being startled each time the voices would start up again. Even now, after hearing it maybe 60 or 70 times I still get caught up in it. In listening to it again recently, I was struck by the longstanding resonances between the works of Alexander and Mackey.

Listen to Will Alexander read his poem A National Day in Bangladesh from the KENNING magazine CD.

PENNsound has just made all of their William Carlos Williams recordings available as singles. This is a big deal, especially for anyone teaching his work. Yay!

These are some MP3’s I’ve been listening to lately:

Stacy Doris, Initial

Brian Kim Stefans, Um, Uh

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Health and Safety

John Godfrey, This Big Wingspread

Summi Kaipa reads The Epics on PENNsound.

Here’s a link to a brief print excerpt and ordering information via Leroy Chapbooks.