1. |
a physical sleep
03:08
|
|||
|
A Physical Sleep
There’s a coldness in the world
that resists the cliché, that is itself
a haggard cliché: men and women
who can’t approach poetry, or airy
autumn-ridden elms, or their own
fragile children, without blanching inside.
While giant Rams and Navigators,
Yukons and Suburbans, Explorers,
Expeditions, Land Rovers, Range Rovers,
bully their paths towards pastoral bliss,
rugged, enduring, trucking dreams
so tiny and fugitive you could lose them
in a purse. So what’s worse: to be trapped
inside a vault, or to be set so free
that you eat and sleep and fuck
ever so slightly aloft, not grounded
and yet never soaring—some albatross
hanging limp on your person, absurd
and unrelenting. The coldness in the world
is like that—extracted from the atmosphere,
infused with animal corpses,
and attending our bodies, meticulous
as disease. But what would happen
if we just cut loose, this time in honest pursuit
of the earth, experiencing a world
strangled by our schemes,
though still mysteriously breathing?
Our pursuit would soon dissolve,
to tired, shallow sighs—
and then in the quiet of utter exhaustion,
noticing the elegant mantis,
or the skeletal leaf that so resembles
and has nothing to do with our dreams,
we’d fall into a physical sleep.
We’d let the body regenerate.
We’d let desire pool in a place
we vow to never go.
|
||||
2. |
||||
|
Out of Obscurity (The Ghost of Alan Lomax)
Mr. Lomax asked me if I knew any good blues singers in the neighborhood. I told him that Willie Brown was up at Lake Cormorant. Well, we drove up there to find him and we were told that he was off fishing someplace. We drove along the levee and I kept on singing, “Willie, Willie, Willeee." Finally he heard us. What do you think about that?
--Son House
Breathing hard, I hack my way
through the foliage, coming upon dales,
upon antiquated glades. Upon
ideal riffles where trout are fattened
by ideal flies. Somewhere beyond
an earthen wall, on a legendary lake,
primitive cormorants preen.
They hold their wings open to dry,
suspended in the thick sun.
There the genius fishes peacefully,
for barbed catfish and gawking bass.
I swear I'll find him, extract him
from obscurity, and place him
under enormous lights. I carry
my tape recorder everywhere:
a greatness might be nestled in the brush.
All is feral, or wild. Azure trumpets
announce his presence, purple lilacs
scent his breath. He'll emerge at last,
lush and uncompromising,
to hum the lost spirituals,
and to sing his awful blues.
|
||||
3. |
||||
|
Shaking in Our Makeshift Houses
The trees are thinning with their usual exactness,
and autumn's iambic clock
has wound all down. A cold front comes on,
and a storm the size of a dime
opens the mountain sky.
Soon snowfields writhe beneath their own weight,
and a line of firs is halved by an avalanche,
and an elk comes plodding,
breasting the snow. Soon we know
we're suited to this storm,
we match its intensity with our mammalian will,
the sum of meshing pressures,
of the young mountains
bowing under ice. Soon we'll crouch,
subject to the sky, shaking in our makeshift houses.
The creeks will turn feverish,
and the soil offer up its lonely nitrogen,
and our children sleep on mats of humus
and roots. Our houses, new
and elegant as empty trees, will allow
the wind and the light,
allow the storm's undeniable density,
the icy factors that crest and fall,
and our lives, slow
and transparent,
will allow and allow and allow.
|
||||
4. |
how water finds its way
08:01
|
|||
5. |
pornography
02:45
|
|||
|
Pornography
All creation is a project: the wilderness a garden,
and sex merchandise. We like having a project,
unlinking our words from the physical world,
maybe just for fun. But the single moment pushes out,
crowning, and the world dilates,
not because we will it,
but because it must. Certain animals emerge,
clothed only in feathers and hair.
Desire is metonymy,
so we want eros, we want suckle:
we want the earth. Even if colonial lust
has begotten it, there is an Eden of the moment.
So cast out, there are women,
and they hunch in eroded soil. Oxen
and caribou enter the cities at night. There:
only men, their genitalia elegantly hidden. There
the adolescent courses through empty rooms,
like an androgynous moon and sun.
All thought is drunk by the sun,
reduced to the salt and chemicals
of its origin. One might walk incessantly,
as one always has, but without thinking,
strictly, of anything. Eventually rain
exposes a fossil snail, an artifact
of pure sex: rhythm and exchange,
and the turn inward, toward the pin-point
of becoming. A few millennia later, look:
the yellow-humped boulders
have formed tombs upon the snails.
In that landscape of privacy,
I project myself onto others,
whatever sex or species suits me,
and hop off to the half-light in the cave.
I'm mobile. Something of the body,
unmediated, is urging me on.
I respond like an animal,
like a limousine. I'm the alpha:
I'm free of time. I'm the sweet no one
you love.
|
||||
6. |
x-change
07:44
|
|||
7. |
out of the wind
12:13
|
|||
|
Out of the Wind
Pull back just a bit and earth
is entirely textual, motifs absorbed
into earth's good motion—
but not lost, you see, just more
and more inherent. This ambience
was happening to me back then.
I'd climb a ridge, and halfway up
I'd turn around to look. Well:
where I had walked was not
where I had walked. The dodge-
and-burn of spring days, of high-rises
and big box stores against mountains,
against mud-laden rivers
or patches of trees, presented itself
impartially. Did not present itself to me,
understand, but rather merely occurred.
Did not occur to me, understand,
it just was and so how could I
have ever walked there? I was there,
but there was so far from me by now
that I might as well pause,
by some big old spruce,
at some outcropping,
and sleep awhile
out of the wind.
|
||||
8. |
swerve/sing/stagger
10:18
|
|||
9. |
slash
04:39
|
|||
|
Slash
Among the yellow signs
inscribed with arrows,
laconic and obedient
as I follow the arrows up,
I ascend the mountain pass,
seeking the chaos of water.
Seeking the slash
where the water erupts,
where the mountain's side
is scarred with ice,
where violence is both fast
and glacially slow. A way
of making, and of pausing.
A way up, a way over.
Fuck all that.
A way through.
|
||||
John R. Campbell Corvallis, Oregon
John R. Campbell creates soundscapes via jazz, experimental, contemplative, spoken word, & alt roots textures. He's worked
with
Trio Bravo triobravo.bandcamp.com
Blind Lions blindlions.bandcamp.com
Woodman/ Kellam/ Campbell woodmankellamcampbell.bandcamp.com
Avant Garage
avantgarage.bandcamp.com
& others. His blues persona, Green Man Blues, can be found at greenmanblues.bandcamp.com
... more
If you like out of the wind, you may also like:
Learning To Swim On Empty
by Wu-Lu
featured on Bandcamp Radio Apr 30, 2024
go to album
True Romance EP
by James Massiah
featured on Bandcamp Radio Apr 9, 2024
go to album
The dark, poetic second album from the duo of Adam "Aran" Nenadál and Anar Badalov is rich and meditative.
go to album
A collaborative ode to the mythology and culture of the Czech Republic, pairing meditative poetry with menacing sounds.
go to album
Portland's Dao Strom describes her work as "song poems," gorgeously layered dark ambient folk soundscapes with a heavy sense of foreboding.
go to album
Laughing In My Sleep
by The Cradle
On his latest LP, Paco Cathcart sketches life in Brooklyn in remarkable detail.
go to album
This healthy helping of hooky indie pop from Melbourne’s Parsnip is candy-coated bliss.
go to album
