the voices, voices http://www.alansondheim.org/thevoices.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/thevoices.mp3 sarangi (earphones if possible) http://www.alansondheim.org/voices.mp3 sarangi the 90-year-old sarangi is a beast - difficult to play, dense, awkward, some strings permanently out of tune, but the very gruffness absorbs me, as if there were an orchestra of survivors. i am a survivor. some of us are left and around us, the meat of memory, recollections of recollections. a draft runs through the instrument - there is no support rod in the interior of the body - it's held together by tension and the thickness of an unknown dense wood. its body becomes my own. i use a small bow that both of us, the sarangi and what is left of me, agree on. the bow bows, bows. the sarangi replies as if there were a causeway of people passing from an unknown distance, moving towards an unknown destination, as if there were such, a destination which would welcome one, which would welcome anyone. and what you hear in these two pieces are their voices, and the suffusion of their voices within us. wood and skin and metal, bone and tissue, nerve and clotted space - we occupy these things together in an incredibly thin wedge of the real. what you will hear, if you listen, and you will listen, is just that, the real, faltering through almost a century, returning, as if the real were a movement or a caravan, along a causeway or chorus, our flesh among the trace or trail of survival, among bodies and wood, flesh and metal, among bone and tissue and nerve, clotted space, ululations, keening, the wept, among so many, our moving, the wept, nowhere to go but on http://www.alansondheim.org/thevoices.jpg _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
