Ruimas Basnikas – Company of minor utterances
May 5th, 2021
https://archive.org/details/enrtxt005_ruimas_basnikas_-_company_of_minor_utterances
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1076991
mons jacet life in 15 pieces
March 1st, 2021
https://enoughrec.bandcamp.com/album/life-in-15-pieces
ghost, don’t scream
December 8th, 2020
Had it been released earlier at various times, Ghost, Don’t Scream would probably have appeared on Broadcasts from Elsewhere, certainly The Outcast on the Ivories, and possibly even Transmissions, three mixes I’ve posted here in the past; but then I suppose I wouldn’t be able to see its unique place at the exact center of whose collective cloud of thematic and atmospheric essence. For the virtuosic (Lithuanian?) artist Martin Rach pulls from all directions to produce the sparse soundscapes that comprise his newest release: various schools of classical piano or amorphous improvisation, the quiet violence within the “spluttering and bubbling, jerking and rasping, whistling and screaming”¹ howls of radio static, the jarring tonal agility and piercing textures of circuit bending, and various other little things that go bump in the night. On first listen, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about the interplay between the grandness of the piano and the minuscule grasping claws of the electronics as “First Apparition” began, but I was immediately sold about six minutes of the way through when the desperate, sterile wail of a rewired audio wire half-harmonizes and descends with the keys—a truly spectacular and memorable moment. To be honest, I’m not sure I get a “ghost” vibe from this, at least not directly; to me it sounds more like the paranoid half-knowledge of something beyond our field of view and experience but not quite being able to grasp it, forever living in obsessive fear. Or maybe that’s just me, because there’s a lot of other narratives one could ascribe—a lone concert pianist playing a final concerto to nobody in a world ravaged by technological apocalypse, a forgotten service robot trying to make music by rearranging its hardware along to a dusty recording it found on the ground. What I really mean is that Ghost, Don’t Scream is lonely, but it isn’t scary, even if you’re scared of loneliness (I certainly am, to an extent), because the sadness with which this soundtrack to humbling isolation is saturated is nothing except beautiful.
¹ Eula Biss, “Time and Distance Overcome”
https://emerge.bandcamp.com/album/ghost-dont-scream
Migrant piece Nr.2
September 5th, 2020
As walking exceeds
the speed of speech
So the journey
untells the meanings you’ve built
Around vessels pre-emptied
Streets distant and void
Skeletons, bare concrete
Analogical tools
I am in the city
Name I don’t dare to
Pronouncing my steps
Wet dry naked outside sentence
Palace in ashes
Eyelids fatigued
Have looked at the fires
Was it a war, a riot, a feast?
Sense bellow knees disappears
Words can not but duck
Oh, i wish my wish was way more
transparent
Transporting logs of trees that were saved
Buckets of grass
Way outnumbered by cattle
This town more like
village
If villages hadn’t gone much sooner
Where do i go? as I go
On the sidewalk of a pool
Shooting someone something
Guess bullets were cheap
Locally sourced
Perhaps for the locals
to feed
King and queen but a memory
of a ghost of a shadow
Thick my fat smartly stored
for famine
Iris, rose, whatever the vase
Discoloured white black
White heat
Too white this shade
I dream, I assume, for no thing’s
like this
Quicker the syllables
Can’t outrun the spelling
Must wake up
To walk the way of
horrors
The richer they got
The poorer it felt
Power consumed
in expanding extensions
That were bound to contain
endless echoes
instead of a source
The root was dug out
Or were those branches?
Upside down
In contradictory bliss
How know when the known
and the knowing
are unknown?
Ha! to that
which hijacked
the revolution of dreams
Speeches by Selma
My laughter is a
lethal weapon
Or so I hope
In vain
Can’t walk
Won’t wake
And so I decide
To lie down
In sleep
Can’t hurt
Heart closer to earth
Black after sunset
on sunless planet
No laws of physics
can explain this charade
though real, so real
Fuck it
I lay down and let
the mayhem pass
In digital circles
Feedback back on feedback
Hypnotizing this mess
Like mass or the masses
Opus and opium
Get stronger by day
when there is one
to come by
Stop thinking, I’m texting
Birds tweeting
Delusions
Illusions
Lesions
I’m less
of a prophet
Unless time runs backwards
Weird words
Wired lords
to fences
Sheep fucking smiling
So big the mouth
So ready the teeth
Sweet sweat first supper
Last god
No more sons
Come daughters
Dart them
Bull’s eye, circumference
Thing is so bloated
Can’t miss it
And I do miss
nights that
calm and gentle
in vortex
of fury
My furry
My ferry
My sea
Weeds and seeds
My body I had
Transformed past your skin
Different of kin
Same of a kind
Kindly destroying
leftovers
Grinding the rust off of chains
Imprisoned in our ankles
Invisible, almost accepted
An enhancement of a desire
to dance
I’m still asleep
Not ready to stand
As wretched and the wretchers
Wither with minimum wind
Wind it up
Alas, too hot to augment
the breeze
Chords and cords
Cards and cardiac arrest
Guards do their duty
Cordially errupting in chorus
To protect and serve
Botswanian free range oxen
to western and eastern
upper class
While importing salted
fish bones and heads
for the classless
Masters of unfinished records
Played in virtual imaginary
Listen up
Down with the masters
Lay down your tired bodies
Cool are the weapons
when viewed sideways
Through blades of summer grass
Sun is shining uneasy
Brightly colouring all
the burnt out pigments
Pigs smelling like mint
Menthol in my ale
All is in one
And one is in all
When you sleep in your dream
of sedated dreams
Dogs barking at the pigeons
that drink river waters
A child, a mother, a dad
Sometimes double of each
Ah, how beautiful life is
when death not in here
Wake up!
Dirty rags clinging to body through blood
Wake up!
More sweat lost than water intake
Wake up!
Bones shattered look like hard candy
Wake up!
I’m not a man
I’m a brick
Wake up!
I’m not a man
I’m thousand petals growing out
into rocks and lowroads concrete
I’m not a man
I’m acid
I’m countless snowflakes landing
on the summer beaches and into your saunas
I’m not a man
I walk
My desire is that we
come round
and as you speak
I autotune the vowels
Promting us to sing
I’m not a man
I run
My desire is that we share
the soil that’s not ashes
And when you grow peppers
I add salt to it
So our bloodpressure rises
To that of the angels
that escaped godly fires
I’m not a man
I have dreams
But my nightmares
are faster
Irrespective of my desire
The carnage continues
As I’m no longer able to fall
Asleep in my sleep
Standing someplace in
the city
I feel my legs disappear
to the tune of clapping hands
Properly handled by security
men
I’m not a man
We know
That’s why we are packing you
I’m not a man
I am poet
My desire is for somebody
To wake instead of me
And do it like it should be
Migrant piece 1
July 14th, 2020
Revolution starts in the moss where the
smell of the spirit is accurate
Rolling on the mountain with your
ass feet back and knees
The sky is open over the rocks
used by sheep to hide from the sun
Even the most gentle of beasts need
some darkness for a change
Fucking laughable the eye is to the horizon
but cares not to emit a sound
just let the wind pass
You look for a ditch to have a smoke
not necessarily a cigar
but something to remind you of a victory
After countless losses
you deserve one quiet
One time of minimal movement
while sheep bell the intervals
between one root or another
Berries in red on the floor made of void
or something approaching the night
with its star crossings
There a dwarf, a giant
and a colossus of sorts
In distance that your feet dare not measure
stone falls making a thud
You listen as if to hear the enciphered message
but the folly of it catches up before
any sense comes to mean
Contracted back into the tiny space
you occupy
Invisible to the far aboves
you make a gesture
Guest neither invited nor off the list
you inhale the scent of blueberry leaves
Which is not much but so is
the volume of your heart
Though fast, thus potentially
ripe for openings
Scattered in grass moss and waters
I am so that my enemies can
never recognize me
My skin on the stones, bark
and juniper needles
So I can ever feel and be felt
by the loved ones
I think of rolling off the mountain
while becoming a rock
Under which in a year or two
there’d start growing all the red caps
In the dark of the night
befriended by moths, slugs and ants
I dream of a god so chaotic that
it makes my innards sing
Having never known its name I wash
my feet in morning dew
Prepared for movement one way or another
I inhale the odors sun offers
My eyes infected by bright blue
come to rest on a lichenous stub
The silence in my head weighs like stones
washed on the river bank
I inspect my skin for no other reason
but its existence
Bits of breeze lost in the
hairy parts
The smile extends further than the jokes
collecting the warmth
left in abundance
By the goddesses that superseded
the gods
Who fell stupid on the guillotine
Centuries of wails echoing among the leaves
that refuse to rot
Panic of those who lost their riches
Courage of those tough in their faith
Paths walked till the heels feel as bone
Tears wiped finger tips softer than rain
Wither the state of trampled convictions
There’s no prisons among animals
no matter the blood
Typing machine resting on the bottom
of dried up lake
Fish that swim back to the ocean
Waves of resistance gather into a tsunami
rolling slow giving birth
To places and time uncounted and
encountered in adventures
Of which I am a witch and I burn
my sins in a fire at noon
Smoke rises over the mountain
and I signal the clouds
‘Bout the tasks close ahead, of the ways,
far away
I hear a sound of approaching quiets
that may hide undiscovered desires
I store few samples of it into a jar
may be opened when back in the works
The job of the jobless is to trail
the truths of declassified vissions
Moving on the sand
as the mountains decay
Half an inch in millenium
so when they reach the cities and towns
It won’t become their demise
but the futures
I dream of which a lot and know very little
but so does every spring
before it autumns
And starts falling on the lakes,
tracks and barren fields
Infesting the village, the town and metropolis
The breath of the blood of the mountains
Cuts deep into the lungs of
workers, the servants and their masters
Dogs howl and cats hunt for the zebras
Dome of the heaven descends so low
That it makes it stupid to wish on the stars
In this jolly chaos you can hear
the revolutionary songs spreading
from the wilderness
You can’t make out the instrumentation,
the lyrics or the scope of its scale
So you sing along hoping for
it to last enough that it can
aqcuire a name
In the meantime you’re happy
you’re not alone
Walking the freedom to the distance
of a mad one
One heart one soul one spirit
One gut and many treats to feel it with
Piercing
July 1st, 2020
Nature deceives a concept by changing its spring.
A thread is for the needle as the wire for the need.
Nartine breaks into a laboratory, carrying her sewing machine in a brown backpack. He unloads pieces of fabric, threads, needles and thimbles by an operating table. She disassembles its legs so as to get it on ground. Works the wires so that some of them are prepared to let the earth loop in.
She undresses and sticks a cable into his belly button. Slowly threads a yarn through the plastic protecting copper filaments. The needle goes into her guts and starts sewing. Marten’s bloodstream gives a pulse of a steady excitation. This is recorded onto an obscure fiber that she made on her night offs. Machines can’t decipher it and can’t store it. There’ll be no trace to rewind and review.
Narten plugs another jack into her calf muscles. Another thread finds a way to connect her twitches to his fallopian tubes.There is soothing buzz in a room. According to reads of a scanner she is dreaming. A part of Martine’s belly skin starts transforming into a textile tissue. It vibrates and interrupts the buzz so as to create a silent beat.
He whistles in her dream.
The needle now works the fabric formed out of her belly. Signs, letters, stitches, scars that she reads with his fingers.
Her whistling changes.
The moon is high listening to the black earth purl. For a moment Martene forgets her name. It disrupts the song as his heart not only beats, but echoes itself in her chest. Electric currents propelled forward by uterine joy make his stomach into 29 butterflies. She is now of the earth and the moon.
In rising waters lilies, drunk with linalool, dance to drumming of celestial spheres.
Needles and wires, plugs and threads stem and spring, branching into a labyrinth of whispers. The ascendant voice gets quickly and gently wrapped into a rag, whose time is of tomorrow.
Marten runs out of premises.
Her work will learn to walk as his hole will howl.
Moonchild.
Live Odd Things in words
May 13th, 2020
“I have already hinted, time and again, at a reviewer’s delight when material from perfect strangers is received which turns out to sound fresh, unpretentious and ultimately more intelligent than the average output of celebrated “names”. This happened with Live Odd Things by Martin Rach, a Lithuanian experimenter with several outings to his credit under various alter egos, usually phonetic variations on the same canon like the “Morten Rasz” used for this release. I will necessarily have to further deepen the issue (the albums, not the monikers).
Meanwhile, we have five tracks of apparent computer music that doesn’t stand still for a millisecond. The vibe is abstractly electronic, with outlandish analog connotations (there also seems to be a dyslexic old drum machine fluttering around). In fact I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the sources are NOT computerized, and remain waiting for enlightenment by the instigator of this sweet mess. In any case, there’s a constant logic in the apparent disorganization; a sort of self-regulating anarchy providing the necessary aesthetic consistency for the survival of the sonic organism within our auditory meanders.
For a (pathetic) synthesis, I would rely on the expression “galactically turbulent”. Awkward bleeps, invasive nano-fuzz, relatively assuaging hums alternate with the aforementioned rhythmic aleatoricism. The whole is spiced with gentler emissions, and leaves total freedom for the receivers to enter this strange world wherever they wish. Although the components of the timbral compound do not really change, a dose of (involuntary?) irony makes the act of listening a smooth enough experience. Bizarre celestial geometries amidst the utter disappearance of “styles”. Fine with me.”
https://touchingextremes.wordpress.com/2020/04/07/morten-rasz-live-odd-things/
https://martinrach.bandcamp.com/album/live-odd-things
Live Odd Things
April 3rd, 2020
The sound of the paper you write on is like the ears of a dreaming dragon.
live odd things by Morten Rasz
i was young and i needed money
March 26th, 2020
As i look at the star,
smoking,
Arvo Part‘s „Spiegel im Spiegel“ on,
i know that there‘s nothing in me
or in a star, or in a music that
can be said properly –
and, as a music waves into night,
i know that i am to myself the way the starlight is –
a flash of already nonexistant thing,
a record, untraceable,
and nothing could happen to me
or the star, or the
music
because we are all here
– the star, the music, myself –
in a way of being mistaken