luminous work -- laylage courie

I make things from words. Poetry, sound, theater, collage.

Brooklyn, NY USA

i make things from words.  things that intend towards light.  here is that round box from the attic.  inside, letters, photographs, unlabeled cassette tapes.  some embossed invitations to my imaginative parties, which are select and increasingly irregular.  like you, i grow old.  i keep my hands busy and my mind occupied.  if it would be better to hold something in your hands other than a machine send me a message and i will send you something real.

the nether-reaches of genre

June 27, 2018  /  laylage

Tomorrow is the first full-moon of Summer.  It is the day I will send out into the world the music video for the first "single" from these fountains rare here. 

My record.  !!  It has made it through the ardours of post-production and is on its way to be aggregated and burned.  Like the witches. 

But I shouldn't think of it like that.

I am keeping the part of my brain that dreads release (the witches? people destroy them) busy researching tags and writing press and in doing so I am

confronted with the realities of genre.

I'm always late to the party and wearing the wrong clothes.  I'm not cool and I have no genre.

I made a Venn diagram of the music that helped me make this record.  Venn is a cool word.  And I like circles.

tfrh_venn.png

 

The sound of this record is very far from Quadrophenia, and yet that record shaped theses fountains more than any other.  I charted the songs' semi-narrative flow through space (boardwalk, seashore, parent's house, town...) and time (interior, past, actual...) .  I fixated on the placement of the ocean wave motif, and on the echoing key themes ("Is it me / for a moment...").

Quadrophenia is a concept album evoking a boy's coming of age at a particular place and time.  these fountains rare is a concept album about a woman's coming of age in an imaginary place and time. 

Imaginary places and times are more my specialty.  And, yes, I said "woman" and not "girl".  I'm exploring a different age-of-becoming.

tfrh_genreblog_middleage.png

There are other influences.  these fountains started as a radio play and I'm a poet so the D. Thomas link is clear.  I directly riff on and feminize the classic "Crossroads Blues".  Church hymns, which I grew up singing, play their part.  The band Garbage, in particular "Stupid Girl", was accessible and grounding.  I studied extended voice techniques (in the Roy Hart traditition) for years; Diamanda Galas (and Mariana Sadovska and Tanya Tagaq!) are the masters of the wild female voice I aspire to release into the world.

tfrh_genreblog_mermonk.png

 

Everyone who has heard these fountains so far mentions Laurie Anderson.  Even though I don't listen to her much, it's obvious she is one-who-came-before.

I could put myself in genres I like the names of:

tfrh_genrelist.PNG

Instead I'm researching genres for: Anderson, TuneYards, Kate Bush, Joanna Newsome...

Stay tuned.

Laylage

 

 

Comment
categories / new work
tags / genre, music, these fountains rare here, the who, quadrophenia, laurie anderson, feminist art

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