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Sound of an Unperplexed Wren

from Words and Silences by Brian Harnetty

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lyrics

Sound of an Unperplexed Wren
Merton Archive Tapes 231-01, 213-08

Ok, now I hope we can go on recording like this; I think it will stay down. Good, let’s go.

The sound of an unperplexed wren. No comment necessary.
A cardinal. Meadowlark. Cardinal. Flycatcher.

Voice of the tape, a comment on the silence of the hermitage. The silence commented on also by birds. Now some experimental reading. A piece of Samuel Beckett. Abstract, like a painting, two-dimensional. The colors: it is flat, but fascinating. Something like Klee, Paul Klee.

It has a strange effect. Like a message of spies. Definitely affected by the media that we use. The end of the piece sounds almost metaphysical. An interesting piece of writing. I wonder how it sounds. Perhaps I’ll play it back in a minute.

Sounds very good. What it brings out is the monotony of the language and of the syntax evading complicated statements. Simply stringing together nouns and adjectives and so on seems to emphasize the metaphysical silence behind the person, the persons that he is talking about. And in the end, the silence is emphasized as being metaphysical. This is a piece which does manifest the silence. The perplexity is very subdued in it. And this is the right kind of perplexity. Not an emphatic perplexity, but a subdued and deep awareness that everything is perplexed. And that in this getting back to a concrete elemental awareness of the things, without anything that we have added to them, without any comment of our own, seeing them in their bareness, their way of merging into each other, their flatness. Taking away the perspective that we have put into everything. Seeing them again as flat. Allowing them to make their own different perspective of something underneath which we have not presupposed, which we have not put there. Honest, Beckett.

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from Words and Silences, released October 7, 2022

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Brian Harnetty Columbus, Ohio

Interdisciplinary artist using sound and listening to foster social change. Recordings on Winesap, Karl, Dust-to-Digital, Atavistic, and Scioto Records.

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