February 21, 2009: I spent yesterday afternoon recording texts with St. Deborah for future Violence and the Sacred compositions. This is a return to form, as the use of spoken, textual material was a defining characteristic of the VioSac improv group, dating to our first concert (May 16, 1986) when, towards the end of the show, I threw on a cassette of St. Deborah reading (Starhawk, I think) material concerning magic, paganism, and witchcraft. It had an antecedent in Sri/Scott and St. Deborah’s contribution to Santa Satan’s Holiday Hellocaust, Eating Snow, which featured more work by Starhawk.

In all future VioSac improv group shows and some studio recordings, notably Now a God Dances Through Me, St. Deborah’s voice was prominently featured, reading work by a variety of writers including Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Isidore Ducasse, Terence Sellers, William Burroughs, Franz Kafka, and oddly enough, Graham Stewart. Most of these recordings made it to album or cassette and some are listed below.

Adding specific textual material to abstract, largely formless music imposes a very strong meaning and direction onto the work. There may not be any connection between the text and the music except that which is created by their intersection. I, being a vague person, feel somewhat uncomfortable with the specificity that the texts gave the music. Song/album titles for abstract music are similarly problematic for me. How do you apply words to something which in its nature is non-verbal, even non-literate?

Nonetheless I have ideas (usually other people’s ideas!) that I want to express and so I was very enthusiastic about a opportunity to put together, along with St. Deborah and John Whyte, a diverse variety of material to be read, most of which I hope one day will be included in some kind of composition. Yesterday’s recording included works by:

• Sei Sh?nagon: an small section from her Pillow book.
• A possessed child from Kinshasa.
• A Paul Celan poem, Death Fugue.
• Excerpts from the King James Version of the Bible including Psalm 38 (very despairing), a section of Ezekiel 19 (which I first heard quoted in the television program Millennium) and both St. Luke and St. Matthew’s telling of Christ’s Parable of the Lost Sheep.
• Several poems by VioSac participant and designer John Whyte.
• Some beautiful prose by Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas from “The Other Campaign”.
• A small excerpt from Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb.

It will take some time to think about what to do with this material, but a small part of it will end up on the next VioSac CD You are Planning to Enjoy the Apocalypse. The overall tone and emotion of the material is: sad, gentle, and mysterious, which I suspect reflects changes in my perspective over last 20 years. St. Deborah did an enthusiastic and dedicated job, both with the recording and with tolerating my passive perfectionism. It was really wonderful to have some collaboration on a project again.

For reference, here are some MP3s containing earlier Violence and the Sacred work with St. Deborah:

• Now a God Dances Through Me … Maurice Blanchot.
• Suture Self Excerpt … Samuel Beckett.
• Lost Horizons Excerpt … Isidore Ducasse.
• Arkinoid Excerpt … Samuel Beckett again.
• Stürmisch Bewegt … Friedrich Nietzsche.