Joe Halder's 'The Falling Room' on CFBU 103.7FM

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This episode of Joe Halder’s ‘The Falling Room’ on CFBU 103.7FM aired on February 5, 2010. Brock U/public radio: cfbu.ca. It's an hour.

I found the pieces Halder collected and wove into a radio show inspiring, enthralling and just plain wonderful to listen to (though I have to admit the first piece was my least favourite - keep listening, some jewels to come). A short piece I recorded back in 2005 (1½min) is included.

His show features experimental, minimalist and avant garde music from independent artists. He came across my work at SoundClick. From our little bit of correspondence, he strikes me as a perceptive, brilliant guy. He engages in conversations with the artists he airs; quite young, my bet is that he will shape some of the independent music he plays. Already he is giving me ideas for how to develop my future poetry recordings, enabling me to see his ability to potentially shape a vision of independent music firsthand.

Here is the production sheet/playlist he sent me:

The Falling Room - February 5, 2010

ARTIST - ALBUM - SONG - LABEL - CANCON - TIME - TRACK

0 Minutes:

Steve Hansen Smyth - Internet Release - SUNDAYALYSIS - Independent - X 5:16 - TK 16

Elaine May Bowling - Internet Release - EAT MY WORDS - Independent - X 1:54 - TK 6

Brenda Clews - Internet Release - MARCH 4, 2005 - Independent - X 1:29 - TK 3

Indian in the Machine - Internet Release - TRIP ON MY FLUTES - Independent - X 7:25 - TK 3

Omni toner - Internet Release - GHOST DANCE - Independent - 2:39 - TK 3

20 Minutes:

Phenotypo - Internet Release - THE # 3825, PLEASE RECEIVE A MESSAGE - 7:46 - TK 6

30 Minutes:

Mickey Zero - Alphabetical Orders NAMES LIKE, SONGS LIKE Mickey Cohen - 3:30 - TK 4

Earth 2 - Internet Release - EUROPA SIRENS - Independent - 4:13 - TK 4

40 Minutes:

Tom Parsons - AZURE SPARKLE ON THE WATER - Parsongs - 4:40 - TK 1

Salatus Train - MYSTERY RAIL COACH - Independent - 5:30 - TK 7

Anahata - Internet Release - HEMI SYNC BRAIN WAVES - Independent - 9:32 - TK 4

60 Minutes

Note: Salatus-Poland, Mickey Zero (France), Phenotypo (Japan), Omnitoner, Earth 2, Tom Parsons, Anahata (USA)

                                                    

Women's Circle: 'Dancing an Unwinding,' Summer Solstice 2009

direct link to Dancing an Unwinding

It's important for those in the entertainment industry to create smart, cool, sexy, funky, daring, glitzy videos to be noticed, to make a name, to become famous.

I'm not trying to call attention to myself particularly except as one of the participating women; I have nothing to sell; I am not remotely attempting to make money on any of this; I am not trying to impress anyone with my talent, or anything else.

I'm only promoting the creative self-expression of women, ordinary women, in unfacilitated dance. No choreography. It's all about feeling comfortable with who you are and flowering as yourself.

This video was shot on a tripod with an absolute democracy whereby no-one got close-ups or special attention. No cuts were made to the footage you see, the music is uninterrupted, but quite a number of filters were added. The stop motion filter, for instance, was done frame by frame, about 9 hours. It took probably 40 hours to produce something that looks like almost nothing was done to it, that's perhaps slow and ordinary to the eye used to lots of action and special effects.

Makes me think of Wordsworth's language of and for the common man, or Courbet's determination to paint the ordinary, stones, roads, fields, farmers.

It's an aesthetic: the beauty of the ordinary. How the ordinary is dreamy. How enlightenment flows out of the ordinary. How what is truly marvelous is the unassuming, the everyday, an expression of joy in everyone simply because they are. What is most surreal is the real. I hope to convey some of this with the way I chose to show the footage.

Dance is an ecstatic, uplifting, enlightening experience. I hope this little video imparts some of the warmth and joy of the connectedness that occurs during these wild and nurturing dances. After last Summer's Solstice DOWH (Dance Our Way Home) session, some women kindly stayed to dance. The camera taped us for dance stills for an article I was writing. The footage was so sweet, however, that I created this little videopoem. You can read the prose poem here: Amaterasu.

Dancing Women: Erica Ross, Laura Nashman, Evelyn Kryt, Angela Greco, Jade Niemczyk, Linda Robinson & Brenda Clews. Event: Dance Our Way Home (DOWH), June 20th, 2009, at Dovercourt House in Toronto: danceourwayhome.com

Background music from *Collection Hapa* by Keli'i Kaneali'i & Barry Flanagan: mountainapplecompany.com

Videotaped, edited & prose poetry by Brenda Clews: sites.google.com/site/brendaclews 

The Dreaming in the Dark series is DOWH too, and I'd love to compose another videopoem after a session. If you're in the Toronto area and are interested in participating, please contact Caro, and if it's not full, come to the next session (Sat Feb 6th, Dovercourt House in Toronto, top floor, 2-4pm) where I'll ask the group.

                                                    

'Crepusculo' by Yachar: A distant flame of hope in the dark dream of endings.

Yasar's Crepusculo, or Twilight, consists of 3 songs from an opera based on Lord Byron's poem, Darkness. Yasar, in his album notes, offers the first lines: I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light: [My response based on notes written while listening to 'Crepusculo' by Yachar] Yachar has tackled a massive tableaux and offers us a grand and deep and lonely cry for life. The soprano sings as the angel of our heart. We call to the soul of the universe for forgiveness. We love. Love sings in the tragedy. Our spirits sweep on love's beauty. The Celtic harp, acoustic guitar, and other delicate instruments, complex rhythms upholding the operatic voices, the music Yachar has composed, it's uplifting joy, offers a distant flame of hope in the dark dream of ending. A calamity overwhelms before which we are helpless. This is the power of the dream - a nightmare from which we cannot awaken. A spectre of unrelenting darkness, loss, loneliness. In the midst of the desolation of everything, the loss of the sun, all life ends, the stars wander in the void, even the waves of the ocean die, people become savages before everything expires into eternal death. Only darkness has no need of aid, and it is darkness that remains, as Byron writes in his great poem, "Darkness...-She is the Universe." Though throughout these songs there is a relentless, inexorable movement, something unstoppable, a great dark shadow that travels with the beauty, as Byron relates his apocalyptic dream, "The world was void...seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless- a lump of death- a chaos of hard clay," and so I hear perhaps marimbas in the background of the last piece that sound like delicate bones rattling, a reminder. Death is ever our accompaniment in this beautiful graceful gift of life. Yachar's musical art sings of this truth with great passion, sensitivity.

Yachar CREPUSCULO

This album was recommended to you by:    brendaclews

To go directly to the site, please click here...

                                                    

Perigee Moon

From A women's circle dance practice

Metamorphosis Under the Moon, 2010, 28" x 22", 71cm x 56cm, oil pastel on paper. Click image for larger.

Perigee Moon

Under the full moon,
she mutates.

Her arms, bone
twigs become wing feathers.

Red hair flaming in the white light.

A riptide of ocean
in our blood
pulls to the surface,
this night of imaginings.

Moonlight glosses the lake.

The white muse moon pours magic.

Under the full moon we see
in the dark, our dreaming eyes open.

Pastel on black paper, my fingers dance.

The women sculpt each other.

A creatrix is born.

She is a wild woman.
In the circle of wild women.
In the wilds, where we transform.

Among the night animals,
owl, wolf, jaguar,
where our breath roars,
whispers, sings,
where our visions
transform us.

_

Pastel sketch done in Caro Cloutier's Dreaming in the Dark Series yesterday afternoon, January 30th. Poem written today. The perigee moon this year was very bright; we saw it under clear skies.

                                                    

The Voyage Brings Us Home: WMRI's album "Moon Events"

I travelled and came home to myself, listening to this profound album.

direct link: Moon Events

I'm guessing the last track is the later studio one... the energy shifts quite dramatically in 'Excavation Site in Sector E-4.' Yet, as with the previous three, which were created in an on-air improvisation jam session for an hour long streaming radio show, it builds its soundscape with fast sliding repetition inside long tonal waves until you are caught in the swell, part of the story, enthralled with the expedition, unable to leave until the song has ended. Mike Winchester's music is hypnotic (in track notes he is listed as composer). There is speed, excellence, command: we know where we've come from and where we're going, it's the journey that's exciting. It grips us. And what a journey! The astronaut metaphor of visiting and populating the moon in a futuristic excavation creating a 'Moon Train Station' works beautifully with this Berlin School inspired music. Within sameness, and progression, come profound insights, enlightenments. I felt comforted listening. In the peace of dynamic opposites. 'Images of Light and Dark.' Unions. In the final piece, though seeming a departure from the earlier three, the music entirely stops perhaps half way through. Silence. What are we to do with this? Has the album ended? Is there an anomaly in the moonscape? But no, the silence is music. It all comes to rest. Sound gathers in its silence. That silence, like through a glass darkly, reveals what I consider a brilliant album that I will listen to again and again as I discover more deeply who I am by listening. Thank you WMRI.

                                                    

A Snow Globe

The landscape, a white squall while I walk through it. Snow thick as confetti. The Ice Queen married her King and the atmosphere swirled in celebration. My eyelids sting with windburn as their chariot rises into the north wind. After I found the street again it seemed the landscape between the hills had been shaken like a snow globe. Blue, blue sky, sunny, no wind.

                                                    

Midnight Sun: Wind Over Grass

From Midnight Sun: Wind Over Grass, 28" x 22", 71cm x 56cm, oil on canvas, 2010.

A painting depicting contact dance - which is... out of the dance studio, for sure, and into the dreamtime! And a solar eclipse, which reminds me of the black light, the midnight sun of the mystics.

When the river runs in bands, water ribbons her arm. Or she dances on rocks across. Those who support uphold everything in the underpainting. What is there to say of wheat fields or grass curling flames? Under the midnight sun strange dreams dance with intent.


This painting took 20 days to complete, from Jan 5th to 25th. Though I did initially work from an old sketch, I discarded it. The images developed, like in a dream, of their own volition organically. The figures and landscape are imaginal. It's finished, even if in 6 months when the oil paint is dry, I add a few details.

                                                    

Once Upon a Time there was a Dreaming Woman

Once upon a time there was a dreaming woman whose dreams were of the moon that the animals sang to.

When the flames came out of the fires in the dark night the people fell like stones and joined the earth.

Afterwards in the great scrolls it was written that a lake arose in the sky and the mountains flew like clouds.

Those who remained knelt before the great healer, a man with white flowing hair and copper woman breast-plates, and received the blessing of the future.

Golden grains of the earth filled the communal baskets of the dreaming woman.

___

Dreamtime story I wrote based on the pictures of random Tarot cards at Caro Cloutier's Dreaming in the Dark Series.

                                                    

Still working on Wind Over Grass...

From Wind Over Grass, a painting (click for larger)

Wind Over Grass, 28"x22", 71x56cm, oil paint on acrylic black base, 2010, blocking shape and colour - solar eclipse added. Photographed indoors in window light, no flash.

                                                    

YouTube channel design

I've created a new YouTube channel design for my site there: http://www.youtube.com/user/brendaclews. The background image is from Hubble. It is the spectacular photograph of the birth of stars in a star nursery.

From Device Daily:

"This star shot is described by Hubble-site as the “largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood.”

According to experts, this group of stars is called the R136, which is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula. This Nebula is a “turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.” The 30 Doradus Nebula is the largest and most prolific star-forming region in our galaxy.

Many of what we see as diamond-like icy blue stars are massive constellations that can only be seen in the 30 Doradus Nebula since it is the only nebula that can house such amazingly large group of stars. These “hefty stars,” are believed to transform as supernovas in the coming years.

This shot of the R136 were taken between October 20th and 27th 2009 by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. The blue lights are from the hottest and biggest stars, the green lights are from oxygen and the red lights are from hydrogen."