Friday, January 15, 2010

Pauline Oliveros's "Beautiful soop"

the beautiful - here it is a disruption of harmony and proportion. the elderly warble of a woman - her sentiment cuffed by a flip, a reversal - widening and branching out, a man's voice with a flange trailing after it, spreading out, increasing his original words. a story, a narrative arc interrupted by a high-pitched tone swelling and dropping; a cloak of squeals amplifying, obscuring the melodrama which struggles for awhile and then reasserts itself. a kind of patter, switching back and forth, to and fro: a conversation enacted between the past moment of utterance and the presence of process in a time that is not now. this juxtoposition elevates language to a position of excess and disproportion, refuses to repair the rupture, refuses and continues to send the word farther into a decadent canopy of noise. nonsense and response; the commentary of a fluttering, electric pulse on human language. finally, the voices liquefy into a synthetic soup, the surge of a dominant electric whine. if articulation cannot, will not join the dance, is speech still a means for locating new possibilities, new potentials for embodying experience?

2 comments:

Roxanne Carter said...

it is weird how everything got standardized.

Trace said...

I, or rather, i reinstated the lower-cases back into the post. I prefer titles in a common format, but I'll defer editorial processing on the main content here.