COWS/CHAOS
/’kaws/
“Don’t analyze it, just take it all in.”
Milford had won me over. Before I saw him touch the drums. Before even seeing or hearing him for longer than 3 minutes.
A trailer of a documentary titled Full Mantis, 2018. The heart that beats like a metronome is arrhythmic, diseased. Why would you wanna play like that? Den-deng-a-deng. Den-deng-a-deng. Are you gonna let the big trucks run over you? Isn’t life also aliveness?
Listen. The heart goes - BÄBÏ.
Everything else goes quiet, just a notch.
Years pass by, seas and territories crossed - all kinds of shifts of scenario and heart. Suddenly, after all my failed institutional experiences, Milford Graves - the drummer, visual/sound/martial artist, teacher, part-time polymath grandfather, nurse, gardener - was my first mentor. Yet I only ever exchanged words with him via Zoom calls a couple times. Ironically enough, an Atlantic in between us.
Now, how could that be? How could I know and care this much for an elder, or any person, who I could only just imagine standing in front of me? From where did his voice reach and touch me? More so, who am I to voice his legacy when so many students and loved ones have done and do so with much more intimacy and time?
I can’t say I have met Milford, or fully realized the person he was. Still, he is with me everywhere I go from now on.
***
Ever since I have moved here, I always arrive (mildly or terribly) late to whichever scheduled event the Netherlands has to offer me. I take that to be a virtue.
From early on, daydream states have always been openly accessible for me to undergo, where I imagine an entire reality around me. Often enough they emerge as a narrative, and always as a space. My parents like telling and retelling the stories of how I preferred being left alone in my room when playing, no interruptions whatsoever, and maybe that was because I had not yet accommodated a space for them in my trance. You see, two or three plastic dinosaurs were already an ecosystem. Going into playing would mean revisiting, transplanting and rebuilding, ever new, a space left off the last afternoon. Paradoxically, the sweet clarity of the room where all those years moved slowly grew more and more immaterial, into a sense or sensibility itself.
As I grew up, or pretended to do so, these daydreams would encompass the people around me and grow interconnected through all kinds of themes. It would happen anywhere, any time. Of course, my own little ritual to myself, but one of dialogue. Look. Even when touching into a memory, it feels like I imagine somebody - or something – conversing, responding and reflecting to and with me. Now, what does this have to do with the Netherlands?
It was in the Netherlands, and during isolation, that I first felt I lost grasp on memory over my identity, past, sense of self and of my own face. This also meant change. Bra$il was far, in its own pandemonium. Brasília even further. Our unfortunate circumstances also meant an abrupt ease and taste for international telecommunications. Seemingly out of nowhere, the ICA Philadelphia decided to organize a retrospective on Prof. Graves and promptly open up space for weekly online conversations with him. I signed up and brought a friend.
It was also where that same close friend, by the name of Leo, once put his vivid mind and passionate Italian accent together to ask Prof a question about caos. And where he received a prompt response, starting with the beauty of cows, through anatomically grounded sound mimesis, and finding an end in the true meaning of spirit: breath. The only way I can attempt to describe it is that our teacher underwent his own trance, a delirious joy and grace of serving a student with his beautiful, vibrant intonation: “look at these Large animals, man…”. An analogy between the garden, gardener and improvisation was shifted on its back, into a pure expression of the strength of life with contrasting multivocality. Multiple moments, places, characters, lives evoked within a few minutes’ worth of talking.
“Fire with fire… chaos with chaos”, one could say. The disciple would be convinced of the same, and of his mentor’s small yet inspiring error, had he not encountered a large framed photograph of a foggy cow field while looking up unto the plastic roof of a public bathroom. I haven’t ever quite trusted coincidences, not a bit more after he ran into my house for a speechless show-and-tell.
What did Milford know?
Listen.
What I must admit I have omitted up until now is that this entire exchange took place on one of the nights where I for some reason didn’t manage to join our gathering of all kinds of heads. In fact, I hadn’t had any primary contact with that situation, aside from Leo’s plural narration. Until a night where, as a farewell to a traveling friend and remembrance of Milford’s passing in February 2021, he revealed to me an exact transcript of their conversation, minute by minute. It was when our friend playfully read Milford’s answer, almost matching in pitch, that I knew with a smile. New work ahead of me.
Breathing life into an archive such as this one means blessing my memories. It means rejecting an idea of time that can only think and move forwards. A voice to the ineffable. A saddened part of me questions: how to narrate something I haven’t witnessed in person? Another fuller one trusts the aliveness of life. An aliveness that can only be contained in imagination. But imagination is far too clever for that.
One who can’t grasp the intuition of fantasy, or the fantasy of intuition, is faded to disenchantment. Ever since I’ve moved here, I arrive late to whichever scheduled event the Netherlands has to offer me. I take that to be a responsibility.
ahh… hmmm…
notes on daydreams
Laziness and nothingness are two untranslatable ideas – across personalities, not to mention cultures. Regardless of that, if laziness is the unwillingness to work and produce… Then nothing is the product of a process. What do we do when we’re idle?
We invent nothings in little unconscious gestures.
What does time carry?
Time transports memory and imagination. Narrative, intuition, senses, sensibilities, embodiment, all kinds of content and context… Within each and every one of those, time finds a vessel again.
How fast does time pass? Does time move according to some absolute measure that we internalize as a biological clock or exteriorize as the one with pointers? Does it move according to our expectancies and schedule?
I don’t have scientific answers, but I’ve learned how to count.
I know there’s something stuck in between my counting.
I’ve learned more of how long it takes for me to miss my parents or fall into a nap.
Time passes with energy, a task, tiredness, sleep, involvement, feeling.
Time passes with a sense of narrative.
What can’t be learned is how long a memory takes. Or how long an act of imagining lasts.
An amend.
What does time carry?
Time carries timelessness.
***
The first time I consciously decided to give a voice to a memory, it was because of a story. Text, followed by sound, then a vibration – touch. Landscapes of all volumes flash by.
To perform for me…
Well, form is a container for the subjective moment.
Radical imagination is to know a time beyond what any material circumstance can dictate and pin down.
A second, acknowledge the incredible of what our grandparents materialized.
Our grandparents did make mistakes, which we now extend in any direction.
Deep respect towards failure and all the knowledge within luck and error.
What Bispo rhymed: it’s not that we’re wrong – we haven’t yet been colonized.
Acknowledging a subjective way of listening and interacting, softening.
Delirious joy, childlike servitude, no ownership.
May we always laugh after a mistake.
***
Epistemological violence comes with hegemony over property.
Epistemological violence is property over truth and reason.
A eulogy is a scale of whatever is beyond the individual self.
A eulogy truthful to itself gives continuity to ancestral joys.
No more artist other than an art.
***
The dream, as any good trance, is as an animating kinesis.
Life drive is the essence of doing nothing – “not doing”.
Explanations of the ineffable are the most shared of our subjectivities.
Research precedes itself.
Listening, dialoguing, miming, repeating while de-mechanizing, talking “alone”.
Telling a story to a listener, only with the voice, no words. Receiving a narration back.
An objective in morphing. Transducing collective memory into shared space,
in the creation of metaphors that might answer a single question multi-vocally.
A vague score for affects. Time-induced transformation through a motion of proximity:
(image/immobile –) sculpture – vibrating space, text, sound – into resonant bodies
– meaning
If music is sound over time and sound-installations are supposedly sound over space, in what space does music happen?
That space, transplanted when I sit in a sweet clarity again.
Nurturing a miniature ecology of affects in memory and imagination.
Through and through a shared ground.
Only in admiration for my elders and all those who precede me, and the sonic and cultural ecologies they’ve created to describe themselves and the ones around them.
No lifeless surroundings.
And finally, when I refer to timelessness, I don’t necessarily mean longevity.
Although I grant it lasts.
***
Can we encounter an idea in the obsolete? Can we encounter an idea in the unused?
These are all performative resources. Distribute them.
Embody a transformative touch. A transformative sound
___________________________________________________________________________
gabriel de oliveira generates nondisciplinary sound and performance through dream-states, intuition, and living archives – spanning from guitar-oriented pop, through embodied practice, to organizing collective K__B__. Currently collaborating on audiovisual, choreographic and narrative-songwriting work with Ellington Mingus, Flávia Pinheiro, and Beatrice Sberna. Favorite practice: doing nothing.
This piece is a sibling to the performance-in-progress ‘you just go ahh… hmmm…’ and its sound documentation, available at 3tigrestristes.bandcamp.com. Rejoice!
homebase at kb.hotglue.me