Workbook for "Peajacket era" & "Repeat their lines"

Blog as workbook here.

These are arrangements for two of the guitar parts for songs we will be recording from scratch in Nashville this weekend. I'll pair them with, here, the parts of the poem we will be singing onto them (or overdubbing with Les' reading).

"Repeat their lines repeat their lines"

Ingots of sheer

affluence poles

bomb-drawing grid

of columnar profit

tunnels in the sky

high window printouts

repeat their lines

repeat their lines
credit conductors

repeat their lines

bar graphs on blue

glass tubes of boom

in concrete wicker

each trade Polaris

government Agena

fine print insurrected

tall things on a tray

repeat their lines

repeat their lines

[This has line breaks and repetitions that reflect what I will sing, not what Les wrote. He repeats the lines, but not as much as I will when I sing it.]

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"The peajacket era"

All around them is the old order: brewery brick terrace hospital
horrible workplace;

the scale of the tramway era,
the peajacket era, the age of the cliff-repeating woolstores.

South and west lie the treeless suburbs, a mulch of faded flags,

north and partly east, the built-in paradise forest.

[Again, adding extra line breaks to reflect the pacing of the reading we will use.]

*

Picture of some feller named Thomas Q. Peiffer in a peajacket from a picture gallery of the Peiffer family.

Drafts of cover art for "Sydney Highrise Variations"

Here you have the core Poetry Scores production team at an earlier moment on this journey, waiting for food outside a crab shack in Maine ca. 1995. Traces of that lunch seem to have survived on the frame of this Polaroid.

We were Hoobellatoo, then, and working on what would become our first poetry score, Crossing America by Leo Connellan, a great poet of Maine.

This weekend we will convene in Nashville, with John Minkoff and Dave Melson, to finish our fourth poetry scores, The Sydney Highrise Variations, by a great poet of Australia, Les Murray.

Our production credit has shifted over the years, from Lij and Chris King (Crossing America), to just me (Blind Cat Black), to Matt and me (Go South for Animal Index and Sydney Highrise Variations), though Lij does most of the actual studio engineering (with lots of help from Adam Long).

This year's cover art is very much a trilogy group effort. Matt is doing the design, based on two of Lij's college architectural studies. It was my idea, when I saw the drawings hanging on the studio wall in Nashville, which makes me creative director - my actual title in Poetry Scores.

Every so often, the job matches up with its description.

Here are rough draft's of Matt's cover designs - the links open pdfs.

Rough draft of front cover

Rough draft of back cover

Dana Smith's "Freud's cobwebbed poem"

This is an already outdated work-in-progress for Dana Smith's painting "Freud's cobwebbed poem".

The odd phrase in the title is drawn from the Australian poet Les Murray's great poem of modernity and cities, The Sydney Highrise Variations. I am told Freud figures here for the phallic nature of skyscrapers.

Dana's painting, soon to be finished and already very different from this image, will appear in the Poetry Scores Art Invitational to Les' poem. It will be held 6-10 p.m. (something like that) Friday, Nov. 13 at The Luminary Center for the Arts (follow that link for directions &c.).

All the work in the show will respond to Les' poem and be titled after verbatim language from the poem. It will all be on sale on silent auction.

We also will release a poetry score CD at the event - the whole poem set to music as one scores a film. Here is the part of the score that incorporates the language Dana chose for his title.

mp3

"Hot air money driers"
(Matt Fuller, Chris King, Les Murray)
Three Fried Men
w/ Carl Pandolfi & Christopher Y. Voelker

Nine final mixes from "Sydney Highrise Variations"

Adam Long and I worked all day and night yesterday on final mixes for our poetry score to The Sydney Highrise Variations.

mp3s

"On its vaulting drum"
Three Fried Men

“Also, it’s a space probe”
Three Fried Men
with Christopher Y. Voelker

“The new city standing on its haze”
Three Fried Men
with Les Murray

“Vanished from the central upsurge”
Three Fried Men
with Les Murray

“Employment and neckties and ruling themes”
Middle Sleep
with Thom Fletcher and Stefene Russell

"In ambiguous battle at length"
Another Umbrella
with Les Murray

“Worldwide breath of catching up”
Three Fried Men

“Skill and the shadow”
Middle Sleep
with Les Murray

“Six hundred glittering and genteel towns”
Middle Sleep
with Chris King and Heidi Dean

A highlight from the session.

"The new city standing on its haze" is built from a crudely recorded guitar tap, of Lij picking out a chord progression in Nashville who knows how many years ago, onto some primitive tape recorder. I dubbed Les Murray's reading onto it - a reading recorded in Long Island City - in the spare bedroom of Matt Fuller's sister in Hollywood.

So this crude recording had music from Nashville, dubbed in Los Angeles with an Australian reading in New York. That still, somehow, wasn't enough. It wanted some city sounds. So Adam positioned one (high-performance) mic out the back door and another out a window.

It rained steadily, so we get more water than city, but that's okay, for a watery poem about a harbour city; in this stretch of the poem, Les yammers about the "ship-chained harbour" and "flooded valley".

Worked for me.

Five final mixes for "The Sydney Highrise Variations"

We have 25 songs to finish, mix and master between now and the Nov. 13 release party for our poetry score to The Sydney Highrise Variations. Yesterday Adam Long and I pulled the first five fish into the canoe.

mp3s

1. "Far above the tidal turnaround"

6. "They docked at apogee"

12. "In the land of veneers"

16. "The C19-20"

17. "The cantilevered behometh"

*

We started with the band songs that are ready to mix, thinking they would require the most effort and take the most time, so the artist name for all of these is Three Fried Men.

Three Fried Men is Heidi Dean (vocals), Matt Fuller (guitars, drums, vocals), Chris King (vocals), Lij (guitars, drums, vocals, organ, whistles), Adam Long (percussion), David Melson (bass, guitar, vocals) and John Minkoff (guitar), though John isn't on any of these particular tracks.

"In the land of veneers" features Carl Pandolfi on organ. "The C19-20" features the poet himself, Les Murray, on vocals, and the rock producer Roger Moutenot on drums.

All the words are by Les Murray from his poem, of course (that being the idea of a poetry score). The melodies are mine, worked out to guitar parts by Matt Fuller for all of these but "Far above the tidal turnaround," which began its existence on a very old scratch guitar tape Lij gave me at least 15 years ago. I am a musical scavenger.

Basic tracks were recorded by Lij in Nashville at The Toy Box, assisted by Marc Primeau, though Carl recorded his own organ track at home and hand-delivered the session, and Adam recorded his percussion track on "Tidal turnaround" yesterday afternoon in the studio.

I think we'll list Matt Fuller and myself (Chris King) as co-producers again this year. We kind of worked out the songs and concept, mostly in Coldwater Canyon overlooking Los Angeles.

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Sketch by Lij from an old architectural school project. It hangs on his studio wall in Nashville. It will form the basis of the back CD cover.

Sydney Highrise Variations Art Invitational: a Preliminary Mockup

Michael Hoffman
'"the concrete vault on its thousands
of tonnes of height, far above the tidal turnaround."

Tim McAvin
“Inked in by scaffolding and workers”

Thom Fletcher
"The city kept her flavour fire-ladder high"

Thom Fletcher
"To limit them to standing on economic grounds. With their twists of sculpture"

Chris King

“Dante”

Chris King

“Cromwell”

Thom Fletcher
"The worldwide breath of
Catching Up may serve to keep the mighty, slowing
machine aloft beyond our time".

Robin Street-Morris
"To be solar, I must be nuclear --"

Daniel Shown
"Six hundred glittering and genteel towns
gathered to be urban in plein air,
more complex in their levels than their heights
and vibrant with modernity's strange anger."

Tony Renner
"more complex in their levels than their heights
and vibrant with modernity's strange anger"

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These are ten of what finally will be more than seventy-five works of art (taking into account the various variations) that will be displayed at The Luminary Center for the Arts on Friday, Nov. 13, when Poetry Scores will host its 2009 Art Invitational.

Every piece in the show will respond to Les Murray's poem The Sydney Highrise Variations and be titled their using a verbatim quote from the poem. We will then hang the work in the space according to where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the title appears - as I have done for these ten pieces.

Daniel's and Tony's pieces posted here are each one of numerous variations they are doing on their chosen theme.

I also feel compelled to add that, though half of these ten pieces are by the least accomplished contributors to the show (Thom Fletcher and myself, Chris King; neither of us artists, per se), nearly everyone in the show is a genuine, accomplished, and talented visual artists. Amateurs like Thom and me just are a little more excited by the gig and got started earlier!

Tony Renner vibrant with modernity's strange anger

Tony Renner is prodigiously productive as an artist and has a fancy for variations. I was hoping he would produce a set of variations for our Art Invitational to The Sydney Highrise Variations by the great Australian poet Les Murray, and he did not disappoint.

This is "Variation #18" from a set of 18 that all bear the title "more complex in their levels than their heights/and vibrant with modernity's strange anger".

Like all of the pieces being made for the show, its title is drawn from the poem. We then display the work according to where in the flow of the poem the title appears. These lines Tony has chosen conclude the poem. There is something of a traffic jam at the end, with many people falling for the last few lines, and I don't blame them; they are really evocative lines.

Six hundred glittering and genteel towns
gathered to be urban in plein air,
more complex in their levels than their heights
and vibrant with modernity's strange anger

Colin Michael Shaw, Eric Woods and Daniel Shown also are making art with titles drawn from this language, and Daniel's also is a set of variations. I love this stuff.

The Invitational is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 13 at The Luminary Center for the Arts, which is a really amazing space across from Tower Grove Park and just down Kinshighway from The Royale.

All work will be for sale on silent auction, with proceeds split three ways between the artist, the venue and Poetry Scores, a Missouri nonprofit that translates poetry into other media. Afterparty at The Royale.