Released at September 24, 2012
(c)2012 samadhisound IIc.
Of all gods he is the one closest to humankind. Every word that escapes us is taken up by him and recorded in his files. This index is in continual expension and reaches up into the clouds. Every day he trawls the corridors of his records searching for the perfect adverbial imprint of the grey shades of being. He has begun to spell his way though the collected vocabularies of the world, living and dead, in addition to the lexicon of heaven. In Azerbaijan there are no adverbs, merely meandering circumlocutions embedded elsewhere in the language. The god of Adverbs finds this deeply distressing. The adverb is the part of speech pertaining to afterthought. When the adverb surfaces in human language childhood is over. We are left with overlapping grey areas within the domain of reeasruminative gap between question and answer. Truths have a short half-life This is his gospel. He sees our need to formulate the world, but it is his calling to misgive what is given, and he can only enlighten those who seek enlightenment. When he speaks, his vowels are subdued and his consonants are pebbles scattered over a large plain of shifting nuances. He hides in thunderstorms and fears the cleft tongue of lightning, it is too explicit. He finds shelter in a soft soothing mist. All he leaves behind is the sound of tentative footsteps.
Uncommon Deities poem (Punkt 2011) on music by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré.
Music by Bang, Honoré
Poem by Paal-Helge Haugen
Poems by Paal-Helge Haugen and Nils Chr. Moe-Repstad
The CD release of Uncommon Deities isnÂt a document of the installation, but a reinvention: the poems and Sylvian’s readings are placed in new settings by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. The cofounders of the Punkt festival and close collaborators on the original installation, Bang and Honoré draw on new performances by the deeply sympathetic trumpeter Arve Henriksen and the startling, elemental singer Sidsel
Endresen. These improvisations join live material captured at last year’s Punkt events, in a production that’s spacious and atmospheric, somber and escapist, light-hearted and steeped in history – a recording as rich as the ancestry of the work that inspired it.
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