What is this voice

What is this Voice is a song cycle that includes a single channel video and live music performance I conceived, with music composed and performed by Cathrine Brookman (vocals and electronics) and Taylor Levine (electric guitar), video by Michal Lando and Sarah White-Ayón, and performance by Ariel Lembeck.

The song cycle is loosely inspired by Alma Mahler, and based on a series of poems I wrote which are included here:

1.
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
she sang to see beyond
she sang beyond
for she was the maker of the song she sang.
She was the maker and the song
the maker of the song
Except the one she sang, and singing, made.
The one singing made—
She sang the one and made.

(Based on a Wallace Stevens poem)


2.
What is this voice I hear
this blown up fancy?

As though a voice could emerge
from a collection of parts

thread and fiber
skin and fat
piping air

I have landed in a field of shells
I have landed into a life

floated from party to
party, my way through other lives
borrowing their sounds
their excitements.

Where am I going with their things
their magnitude, their voices?

3.
The burden so heavy at times I envy the dog.

The sea, the sand, the tree, every other living thing

that contents itself with breathing, eating, sleeping, fucking.

So heavy at times I want only to be pregnant.

To have my body do the work.

I think to myself, that will suffice. And it doesn’t.

Suffice it to say the appetite is endless

for work the body doesn’t do

Endlessly trying to make something more

something out of nothing.

I don’t believe in god, but if I did,

I might think it cursed us when it dangled

the forbidden fruit before our eyes

and left us wanting to be more than we are.

Not animal, not body, not blood.

Not dirt and sand and sea and wind and water

Not beast or bird or reptile.

Dark, and light, and on the seventh day rest.

But there is no rest and the burden is heavy