The Best in Sound Art

Yesterday I thought it would be a good idea to remind myself why I wanted to come here and what I wanted to accomplish, so I read my statement of purpose. In it I wrote that I wanted to investigate the literal relationship between texts and bodies and so I decided to go in search of some sound art that explicitly dealt with the body and the sounds that a body can make. I came across this, the best thing I've heard in a long while and this, the most difficult thing to listen to that I've heard in a while. Like a scientific project, Gregory Whitehead's The Problem with Bodies repeats an experiment (the repeated phrase) several times altering just one condition (or taking away one body part) each time. Ignoring what the phrase actually is for just a moment, the project allows us to hear a text separated from a vocal apparatus that can produce it, or a handicapped apparatus. The first thing that interests me about this is how every word in every language is dependent on each of these body parts to work in sync with one another to produce sounds that other bodies recognize. Every single word that exists is tied intimately with our bodies. Every word bears the trace of the larynx, the tongue, and mouth aperture. What relationship does the spoken phrase, spoken by a body with a completely functional vocal apparatus, have to the same phrase attempted by someone who lacks a larynx? Certainly the sound pattern is similar, the scansion perhaps might even be the same, but beyond that I'm not sure.

Let us know look at the text itself: "The problem with bodies is antibodies and the problem with antibodies is no body at all." The proposition begins with a pun. Antibodies are proteins which fight foreign objects in our bodies (words?) and work to keep us healthy. Yet, poses the proposition, they are the problem. In turn, the problem with antibodies is that they lack a body; they are the anti-body. So what is the proposition really? Perhaps we can gloss it as such: the problem with words is that they don't have bodies. Words cannot speak themselves, and the problem with bodies is sometimes they cannot even speak words that successfully communicate, they are always impeded by the materiality of the words and their own bodies. I'm not sure if this is going anywhere or if anyone else is even interested in this, but these are the kinds of questions I want to learn how to answer. It is so difficult to take about sound, particularly sound art and its relationship to text. I think part of this is that we haven't, as literature and poetry students, been trained to value that aspect of the text as highly as the printed matter.

I won't spend as much time writing about Lauren Lesko's Thirst, but I will say that it was very difficult to get myself to stay listening. "Difficult listening" no doubt, which is fascinating in its own right.