Routes,
not Roots
Pierre Joris
Ta’wil Productions,
($12)
la garbure transcontinentale/the
bi-continental chowder
Nicole Peyrafitte
Ta’wil Productions
($12)
by Christine Hume
Internationalism in art often comes with the double bind of elitism
and populism—the desire to be aesthetically impeccable jostles
with the drive to be socially justified and culturally inclusive,
generating alternating currents of bad art and bad faith. American
artists seem particularly ingenuous and cynical about the possibilities
of globalism; perhaps this is why it takes two expatriates living
in the US to finesse authenticity and passion in the spirit of a
nomadic perspective. In their new CDs, Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte
demonstrate how to live in a here-and-now infused with a wide melodic
ambit and an acute attention to elsewhere. They accomplish this
not only by way of a temporal medium, but also via their capacity
for inhabiting heterogeneous languages and methods. Song and story
become travel companions, each trading talents with and stealing
in on the other, in a world where to travel means to follow with
your ears, to transform.
For instance, “Aegean Shortwave” on Routes, not Roots—one
of the more stunning pieces on both CDs, and the only collaboration
between Joris and Peyrafitte on either—focuses on sound itself
as an agent of travel and change. Sound is where language and poetry
connect to fundamental vibrations and modalities of the body and
universe; radio waves shape and connect cosmic and local realms.
The title links “Aegean” as a primary ancient trade
route to “radio” as cross-contaminator of cultures,
and both terms serve as a correlative of poetic praxis; this oxymoronic
coupling also marbles the material past (Aegean) with the immaterial
present (shortwave). The piece uses the trope of a scanning radio,
pace John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape #4,” but
with only one radio and a premeditated script). It sounds like poetry
as if it were radio and vise versa. Joris’s voice stops at
various stations to report inter-nesting nationalities and cultures
with sardonic bytes such as “change Poland into an Arabic
pop song” and “Congolese people discuss the five year
plan to overcome colonialist static.” Joris also self-referentially
comments on the medium itself (“who rules these waves,”
“a live voice must be true”), foregrounding the despair
in the belatedness of facts and the territorializing of air. These
atomized bits of “news” relate the pleasure and problems,
the absurdities and aggressions, of globalism.
“Aegean Shortwave” isn’t limited to poetry, however;
its luminous juxtapositions of rhizomatic reporting cuts across
static and various “world music,” most prominently Peyrafitte’s
melancholy song—an incantatory vocal that freestyles a French
version of Joris’s poem. Peyrafitte’s phrasing works
in relation to Joris’s, producing a dialectical aurality that
kinesthetically discovers the everydayness of displacement. Her
gradually quickening and volumizing lyric lends a dramatic counterpoint
to Joris’s flatly urgent main delivery; Peyrafitte’s
incantation also blues the mood of the piece. Though their voices
are somewhat gendered, identity and agency are mysterious here,
and offer lush mutual feedback of extra- and para-linguistic effects.
The two voices intertwine, travel together, and look opposite ways.
It’s difficult to imagine that Joris and Peyrafitte did not
have Robert Kelly (whose “ta-wil of the first line”
is referenced in their production company) in mind: “This
chant was my first news of the Great Trade Route along which scarce
and isolate merchant-poet-nomads carried goods from tribe to tribe,
over the mountains and under the sun, bringing only the news”
(The Convections). Indeed, there is a traditionally vatic strain
to the entire CD, but one complicated by polyphony, drawing especially
from the Middle East and Europe. The visionary nature of the work
is highly political without putting in abeyance its personal implications.
“Aegean Shortwave” intensifies and amorously entwines
what each performer does best solo.
Both CDs bring in a mélange of musical, textual, and historico-political
references. Both perforate their surfaces with other voices, languages,
and sounds that insinuate ambiance and politics in the spirit of
Giorgio Agamben’s idea of “the coming community,”
one that has no stakes in the identity of belonging, but exists
as a propositional status. The arrangements of both orchestrate
whole gestures, rather than collections of disparate numbers, each
coming in three parts, each repeating phrases, motifs, and rhythmic
signatures. Peyrafitte’s guiding inspiration is her life across
a single line of latitude, though the longings and deep longitudes
weave in a complex criss-crossing of cultural horizons. She introduces
each piece with a short spoken interlude bearing the post-fix “Line”
(DesireLine, SteelLine, FlowLine etc); these “lines”
play between poetic and transportative, where metaphor is literally
moving, and manage both a sense of meander and mindfulness. The
traditional transit mode of communication maintains, yet rather
than validating immediate emotional truth, Peyrafitte yanks the
planks out of ontological grounding. The line here is anything but
linear, and acts as a kind of frontier, perpetually pushing beyond
itself and carrying us through song, chant, and speech in the traditions
of Anne Waldman and Jayne Cortez, but also their own concoction
of Greek tragedy stirred up with Cabaret Voltaire shenanigans. While
both Peyrafitte’s and Joris’s styles are more jazzy
than funky or avant-garde, Peyrafitte tends more toward the operatic.
Whereas Joris employs a double fidelity to sound and written text,
Peyrafitte’s alliegance is equally to sound and performance.
Her zigzag circuit between France and New York with various stops
at stations past and present carries us through dazzling and didactic
fluxes of perspective firmly planted in autobiography.
The sections “The City,” “In Between,” and
“The Desert,” firmly route (not root) Joris’s
CD, whereas Peyrafitte’s has another structure superimposed
on the geopolitical one: she takes us through a three-act performance
that stimulates all the senses with music, video, and actual soup
making and tasting. Of course, we must imagine the latter two while
listening, but Peyrafitte’s compositions are so nourishing
and sensual, so campy and moody, that we hardly miss it. The Yanyuwa
aborigines of Australia believe that music literally has curative
properties. In one traditional method, the healer sings a medicine
song directly into the top of the head of the patient. The song
circulates through the body, driving out illness or unease. In recovering
such traditional capacities of music and performance, Peyrafitte
and Joris’s work ease us out of negativity into a kind of
critically-aware rhapsody.
