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RELAY FOR DEATH "Anxiety of the Eye" C-30 (NO RENT 29)
American noise returns for it's crown.
http://www.norentrecords.com/product/nrr29-relay-for-death-anxiety-of-the-eye-c-30For no reason at all, in a completely unspecified place, no different from anywhere else, you receive an envelope. Upon inspection you find that the envelope contains a specific number of other number of envelopes of very specific varieties. Each envelope constructed of a conspicuous material that suggest previous activity which articulates some form of severance. You try, in vain to find an accomplice to express your thoughts on the curious envelope of envelopes but in the end remain in your unspecified place, alone with your confluence of thoughts trapped in your head, unable to pass them along to another being. In an attempt to erect some semblance of resolve you sit in a comfortable yet alert position and try to organize your thoughts on the matter in some kind of congruency. Your thoughts are NOT the envelopes, but thoughts ABOUT the envelopes, so in the place of the real things you use props, alternates of the actual objects.
1 is made of film negatives. Somehow they have been treated, seemingly in a chemical bath, so that the sharp contrasts of light and dark have been obliterated, although you surmise that they were, before they were diminished, of people and places. Something about the process puts you ill at ease. The intentional act of destroying evidence contrasted against the meticulously sewn together celluloid suggests a criminal act, maybe one more heinous than you'd like to imagine. A nagging feeling in your mind repeats in your own voice that the photos were taken against someones will and in well protected secrecy.
2 is a very delicate paper mash of insect wings that resembles an amber colored seaweed, slightly translucent. Each wing varies in size and has been collected from a different part of the world. There are hundreds in total. You smell it and there is a familiar odor that brings particular distant memories to the brink of remembrance where they tarry around the corner of some obstacle, just out of reach. The strain of attempting to banish the cloud of vagueness, reaching into recesses of the memory stimulates a mild hypnogogia where you half dream that all of the wings came of a great swarm that had converged slowly over multiple decades and myriad breeding cycles involving in actuality every species of insect in existence.
3 is of hide that you hope is not human, and in fact features blemishes similar to those on the back of your own hands and up the lengths of your arm. You tell yourself it is pig skin. Holding it becomes a labor. Spreading it open to look inside you realize there is another inside that and another inside that, again and again, seemingly endless, one within another. You become dizzy trying to conceptualize the limitlessness of it, and worst of all, how there is nothing else beyond this limitlessness of envelopes, nothing beside the repetition of the singular thing. You hope, and even begin to pray, to plead to some very amorphous conceptualization of a God figure that there be some rustlings and bumping, some shuffling or feet or some otherwise collection of sounds at the opposite end of this infinity to suggest the motions and circumambulations of a human being so that you are not alone with this infinity you've found. Your desire for companionship becomes strong enough for at least the sounds of some second person moving around manifest. You can hear them but not see them or signal to them. They sound relatively clumsy; not from general disposition but from haste borne of an extremely stressful task that they carry out methodically. To your dismay you final realize it is the same person who had taken the photos and treated the negatives in the chemical bath.
4 is white paper and plain in every way except that it is vibrating. There is a very specific pattern to its vibration. The slow and inevitable arcs of a sine wave, inevitable to rise once they have fallen, and inevitable to fall after they have risen. Two such waves must be superimposed upon each other, modulating one another to create a tactile moire. It feels both soothing and repulsive in your hand, like a small animal that is copulating and dying. Even though you wish to put it down you are bound by fascination, and hold on. Inside you find what you expect. Another of the same envelope that vibrates identically to the first. You pass that one to your other hand and hold them both palm up to the sky.
5 seems to be entirely organic and unprocessed, belonging to a very ancient time when things identical to this world were made without the violence of manufacture, what one might find in an enchanted world of little people before the race of humans took dominance over the earth. Holding it feels like a privilege that might be taken away at any moment, so you clutch it to your chest like a child and hide it from the sight of anyone who might come by, even though there is no one. Your wishes for a companion weaken and the sounds of the spectral photographer bring anxiety now double fold, although there is peace in the sudden need for solitude, which is only strengthened by the innate naturalness of the envelope. Nature seems to bow around you and all of the apparitions of urbana recede into the folds of time from where they came. You are reminded of the rock in the ocean not far off the coast of Japan from where there entire artistic culture sprung. The world seems like an elegant continuum contained in a thin membrane that protects it from the tumult and disaster outside of the shell.
6 is vegetal but fake. It is so highly organized and every detail about it so mathematically symmetrical that you cannot believe it developed out of holistic nature. It is this sense of doubt that cracks and ultimately ruins the shell. Questions slither in like serpents and wrap around you: What is everything? Where is the everywhere? You turn the envelope over and find the details on the opposite side utterly chaotic. The veins and leafy texture are impossibly scrambled, only serving to compound your suspicions of fraud. Nature could not produce something so thoroughly deformed. You flip the envelope over again, finding the symmetry slightly more calming than the disorder of deformity, but find this time a convincingly real looking leaf has been used to form the envelope. Quickly you forget about the whole dilemma.
7 is a manilla type envelope with a short red string, slightly frayed, attached to the flap so it can be easily sealed and reopened without ruining the envelope. There are many slight fingerprint smudges on it suggesting that it has been passed around for many years from hand to hand. There are creases and soft folds and other signs of age and use. Some writing appears on the back, apparently a message that has been heavily crossed out, and though you can make out the bias of a few letters the message is lost forever. Despite the sensitivity of nerve you've developed from the past experience with the other six envelopes you decide once more to look inside and find nothing.
This is what I was inspired to write in reflection of my listening to these recordings, for in fact the compositions themselves inaugurated a similar hypnogogia. I sat chatting with Bonnie as we listened, discussing rather serious matters, and despite the alertness and attention to our conversation both of us admitted to all the while harboring a secondary narrative carried in the background while we conversed and flipped through a book on fashion. There where foggy characters sometimes in this narrative, which could suddenly, on cue with the assemblage of sounds switch landscape, time of day or year or century, invoke insects and contain itself as well as memories from the recent past within itself, sliding them around from one point in the listening span to another. There was less a sense of the approach toward beauty or ugliness than a camera or at least a roving eye that simply displayed what it saw, even if you couldn't help but believe that the footage had been doctored, and was in essence a kind of propaganda. Would that do, to be cajoled by such paranoia? It would, and it did. The experience of anxiety actually became quite relaxing. The dog even lifted its head and sharpened its ear with a furrowed brow, listening intently to what might be going on, wondering: Is someone here? What's happening? Should I be concerned? Should I sound alarm for something I don't understand? Dogs live for that state, their secondary ideal state to consuming food. Although I understood my own sense of alarm to be fictional, if not right out dream state, I felt affected in a
real way. It was organic. Something happened to my body. All creatures love to be scared, and are scared of things that are unfamiliar and unknown. Such things are also exciting, and stimulating, and without the unexpected the brain would cease to have a job.
