Announcing the Release of A FULL-LENGTH musicAL Album born from a book of poetry TITLED FIREBIRD.

The Firebird is a mythic creature who rises from ashes and in the spirit of the Firebird, Kythe Heller and Sounds Like Things decided to donate 50% of the proceeds from this album to organizations dedicated to fire disaster relief. Firebird was created in the face of multiple climate crises, including a record-breaking wildfire season in British Columbia, the current homeland of Sounds Like Things.

REVIEW ESSAY PUBLISHED 2/15/22 IN FORECAST JOURNAL

MIND IN THE FLAMES : REFLECTIONS ON FIREBIRD

A musical collaboration between poet Kythe Heller and experimental duo Sounds Like Things (Andrew Stauffer and Nicholas Denton Protsack) exploring sonic ecologies of fire.

BY LAURA DOLP PH.D. (ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MUSICOLOGY, JOHN J. CALI SCHOOL OF MUSIC, MONTCLAIR STATE UNIVERSITY)

“WHAT TO CALL IT? POETRY? SONG? METAMORPHOSIS? EXORCISM? BLESSING? GRATEFULLY, THE COLLABORATIVE WORLD OF “FIREBIRD” UNEQUIVOCALLY OFFERS SOMETHING BEYOND THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE, A PSALM WHOSE BURNING ORIGINATES BEFORE AND BEYOND US.”

I read Firebird (the poetry collection) several times before I had a chance to listen to Firebird (the album), and over the last month while traveling, some of my experiences have also become unexpected reference points for this work. When I had my feet on the ground again, I returned to the experimental sound map I originally made of the album and began to write more freely about the piece as a whole. There were some issues that I wanted to address: storytelling, the potential of acoustic spaces, and the ways that Laurie Anderson’s wide-ranging thoughts fed my listening.

For example, I’ve been watching Laurie Anderson’s 2021 Norton Lectures, “Spending the War Without You,” which were running in parallel in my mind while listening, as so many themes resonated. (I highly recommend Lecture #3 about Rocks):

• • The body as a library of pain
  • The body as a living book, if only we had the nerve to read it
  • “consider the source”
  • Making a jewel tree, gathering people
  • Eternal fadeouts
  • Virus as language, language as virus
  • Language as mimicry, deception
  • Language as loss, memorial
  • Language as confirmation
  • Why construct a world? What is it for?
  • “I’m talking to the part of you that never speaks”
  • The music of dreamtime
  • Music about falling angels
  • Letters that have no sound
  • The play of predictive text, its tendency to split voices
  • Blank areas of the page and white fire

I am interested in treatments of acoustic space and silence in Firebird, especially when it functions like a blank page. Since one of its underlying themes is purification, I appreciated the moments of silence overall as references to something already pure, as if to signify the increasingly fewer places in the external world where silence still exists. I don’t mean purity as in a rejection of the general dirtiness of living, but rather because I had just listened to an interview with Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who speaks about qualities of silence and particularly the notion of “natural” silence, where he defines silence as presence, not absence. Where silence is the natural acoustic system manifest. In this context, silence leads to an understanding of place and how it demands certain things of us, like vulnerability, and an interest in an ancient past. As I listened I kept thinking about the spatial implications of the Firebird project, and ways that it could be further dimensional. There were moments where I was aware of the movement of foreground to background and vice versa, and I felt excited by those. There were also transferences of meaning because sounds marked by one concept moved to others, for example:

When a sound morphs and bridges two kinds of imagery:

• • “Burning Girl” [line47, 4:19] “flipping the pages”… when sand becomes a page turning
  • “The Spirit Neither Sorts Nor Separates” [line11, :45] “skeletons” … when typing becomes bones or when sounds are stretched or blow open or compressed:
  • “Burning Girl” [line65, 5:57- ] “everything outside” hollow horn … after this point, when the sound I’m calling the ‘growl’ is stretched to the point of being atomized.
  • “The Spirit Neither Sorts Nor Separates” – I love the beginning of this, so unapologetic.
  • “Runaway” [7:33- ] “edge of a blade” when the blade sharpening stretches, flattens, and morphs or when they loop and become symphonic: [2:53-3:15] “behind the girl was the fire…”
  
  There was only one moment that took me by surprise, which I was unsure about from a technical standpoint: in “That Heart – Let Me Begin Again” at the very beginning, where the voice is mixed more forward(?) It was jarring.
  
  The sound map helped me understand how and when sounds become important for the narrative. For me, it does a good job of complicating the natural and the human world because the girl belongs to both. I thought of George Crumb and Black Angels, especially his gorgeous music of bones and flutes and god-music with crystal glasses.

STORYTELLING [reflections on individual tracks in the album]:

Burning Girl: The soundtrack as a whole feels like an act of encoding dreams. In these dreams, there are characters like the girl, fire, and Death. There are spoken-nouns that act like verbs: fire, door, death, thumb [line74]. And there are literal sounds that imply consequential, unspoken nouns: scratch [1:40], sharpening [2:58, 7:50], flutter [4:04]. Fire belongs to every category.

Mattress Under the Overpass: To this point, it seems that fire will prevail but this section begins with water-liquid, and more significantly ends with liquid over fire. “Snow” from the previous section accrues a new meaning here: liquified. I felt compelled on the second or third listen by how the soundtrack worked across the text, which speaks so much about fire, yet is supported by water. Questions like: “How will she hold herself if she cannot hold this?” remind me of the story of Hildegard von Bingen’s experience of washing her teacher (Jutta)’s body upon her death, and finding that the chain (cilice) that she had worn on her flesh as penitence had made three furrows around her body. For me, in this section the mattress shares something with a body undergoing mortification of the flesh but also the protagonist’s reluctance to wholly subscribe to it. It makes me wonder about the role of penance here.

The Spirit Neither Sorts Nor Separates: This section made me doubly aware of the uneasy co-existence of inorganic and organic forms: x-rays and breath. The Firebird is precisely described for the first time, both its physicality and its purpose [lines 32-38]. At the exit of the lover, a door opens [3:35] and I circled around in my memory to the beginning of “Burning Girl”.

Runaway: I had the image of beads on a mala: each story followed by sound intervals. Its global rhythm is rigid – relentless and iron – even though the words move quickly from one place and time to another. The intervallic structure of “Runaway” is relentless in the same way that funeral bells toll and the bells recall John Donne, and thus something about the inevitable reach of fire (its dreaded inclusivity) and also then, in the larger terms of Firebird, physical metamorphosis. After the story about the blood test, I realized that the beads are each individually, in their own way, pulling against the restricting thread of the mala. They want to escape, to flee. I am held in the grip of the chest-jarring lowest pitch of the piano, it ricochets, super-resonant and ominous.

That Heart – Time Does Not Exist: This audio section is so brief that I had to circle back several times. It was over before it began. Ironically in the context of “Firebird,” I was doubly aware of time in this section because I felt disoriented. When I read Firebird, I didn’t feel this dislocation because one page followed another. That said, on the third or fourth listen, I came to appreciate its sense of landing, of open space and crystalline shapes. When I think of the Pietà, I think of translucency more than anything, and the weight of his body. I appreciated that it made me think differently about Mary’s sacrifice – that in the context of this poem the girl, the grieving witness, could also be implicated in his death or also that (in him) she witnesses her own. The latter is more Catholic, but the former is crazy badass and I’m not sure what to do with it.

That Heart – Let Me Begin Again: This is GORGEOUS, and only makes sense after what precedes it. Let ____ Let ____ Let ____. Benediction, without letting us off the hook. But it is benediction through sight, the desire for sight and understanding. There is no benevolent outer force.

That Heart – A Flor de Piel: I go automatically to the sculptor Doris Salcedo, because of the implicit reference here to her work. I think of flowers and skin, and suturing. I place my mind in the central channel where suturing isn’t about tying but rather about clearing the way for things to pass.

REMAINING QUESTIONS:

What works? What doesn’t? I loved the occasions when the sounds latched themselves onto a semantic meaning or pushed themselves into another one, thereby joining the two. I wanted more of that. I was willing to accept the leitmotif approach, as long as it also involved this morphing. I didn’t want breaks between soundtracks. I wanted it to respect its order without having to manhandle iTunes so it didn’t shuffle the tracks against my will. It’s a silly, and possibly petty, complaint, I know. But nonetheless it affected my experience of the piece. Then again, is it imperative that it follows in order? I imagine it is but maybe I’m wrong.

There are so many things that work successfully, like the perspective switches of the poetry—like: “Let me be no one again” [from “Let Me Begin Again” line5]. For me, every word folds back and reverses.“Let” – an appeal (at least potentially) the syntax and the request, is borrowed from eons before and one that implies the gifts of the external world. In its context however, a reach inside. “Me”—the most conventional of words in this sentence and thus the trickiest because at this point I understand that it isn’t a noun, but a verb, and largely formless be—perhaps because I’ve been overdosing on Laurie Anderson and she reminded me about blank pages and white fire (loving kindness of the Torah), and letters that have no sound (the letter that looks like alif but isn’t). I see this “be” in your sentence as a silent letter. “No one”—an obvious negation (in conventional terms) of the previous “me”. But the first time I read “no(t) one”, a kind of interesting misreading of this word combination also reminds me of when eyes are half-lidded in meditation  stay alert but just enough to put the visual world in proper proportion. In any case, in its negation, I perceived multiplicity again. Like so much of “Firebird,” Cartesian time is undermined and largely irrelevant, dreamlike. There is also aspiration in this word, thus the blessing of Let Me Begin Again.

I’d be interested to see what happens when the words are invited to give way to sound. In other words, at no point did I feel a challenge to the foregrounding (aka priority) of words to the rest of the sound world. The ambient world was careful around them, only on rare occasions did it compete. At first I accepted this as a form of respect, but it could also be interpreted as a form of submission. What would happen if concurrent spaces were added? How many more layers of sound texture could be added without crossing the line to interference? Would interference be productive?

I would love to know what happens when you explore more fully the voice of the poetry from a sound perspective. I still have the impression that the vocalist [Kythe] is thinking separately about 1) reading poems 2) singing 3) other sounds. What would happen if you collectively blurred those lines? I imagine that the separateness in the case of “Firebird” has to do with division of labor, and that it is, after all, a collaboration with different skill sets. You brought different material to the project. But as someone who is simply listening to the finished project, I was thinking: wouldn’t it be interesting to hear the voice morph into a marker of something recognizably human and also belonging to the world of birds? There are so many ways you could go with this – Diamanda Galás, to scat. For a refresher on the former, check out her “O Death.”

I feel like “Firebird” partly answered its own question of what to do now in “Runaway” [13:50-] “It’s not enough to know what she knows. I want—what she is a metaphor for. What she is— beyond metaphor.” In combination with the last line from “A Flor de Piel” – “In that heart, what point is there in dying or being born again?” I guess the scary part is that investigating that “heart” might mean you end up dispensing with some of your assumptions about what art is for. I’m about to dive into that film “Into Great Silence:” Philip Gröning’s 2005 documentary film about the Carthusian monks as a means to introduce Hildegard’s sound world because it’s so fiendishly hard to recreate it, or at least create a meaningful starting point.

I hope some of this is useful. I thank you again. Your piece provided ballast in the early mornings over the last month when I needed something deeper and closer to the bone.

A SOUND MAP OF FIREBIRD

[Editor’s note: The following is a compilation of thoughts and impressions by Laura Dolp while listening to the album. Some of these sonic interpretations correspond to the actual sounds that were recorded, while others do not. Ultimately, they highlight the subjectivity of a listener, the role of active imagination in the listener’s encounter with the album and the impressions it may leave.]

When I first approached “Firebird,” I panicked because I realized how limited my vocabulary is for sound (I know, the irony of being a musicologist). It took me several weeks to calm down and come up with a strategy. Eventually I decided to make a map. On the way across the country, at 35,000 feet, I created a kind of annotated score: listening line by line to the relationship between sound and text, marking their entrance in time, and then creating nomenclature. It isn’t a prescriptive list—in the sense that I expect to be wrong about some of the sounds (their actual sources) or exactly when they occur—but rather I tried to honor my perceptual encounters with word and sound. It undoubtedly includes moments of free association. Sometimes when I was unsure about whether I was remembering correctly, or it was difficult to find the words to describe the sound, I went back and listened to a line several times. The associations are both concrete and metaphoric, whichever came first to my mind.

Epigraph

words in a silent room

The Burning Girl

fire, close to the bridge

inner singing

door opens

“opening” sine wave [line5, 1:28]

“place marked out” scratch [line7, 1:40]

“couldn’t survive” sine harmonic/whistle [line9, 1:45]

“locked herself” key rattle [line13, 1:58]

“voice…singing” metal/chime [line19, 2:24]

“snow falling” pitched metal/chime [line19, 2:41]

“blood against snow” knife sharpening [line25, 2:58] “burned a hole” rustling [line27, 3:05]

pizz upward/pitched

“set her on…earth” drum taps

“in a previous life” drum + pizz rhymed/patterns [line31, 3:25] “through the sky” rainmaker [line42, 4:00]

“speak, said Death” sand shaker/insect wings [line43, 4:04] insect wings flutter, captive but not struggling

“flipping the pages” sand shaker/insect wings [line47, 4:19] “flames…” low build growl [line57, 5:09]

“setting” cymbal [line60, 5:27]

“on fire” fire [line61, 5:32]

“begin to see” lurch/low appoggiatura [line64, 5:54] “everything outside” hollow horn [line65, 5:57]

growl stretched

“up to the flame” creaking door [line72, 6:29]

inner singing [7:26]

whistling overtone [7:40]

“There was wind” sand across a surface [line82, 7:30] “ragged bandage” knife sharpening [line87, 7:50] pulse/flute open [8:40]

Mattress Under the Overpass

water bowl/reverb/arpeggiated upward stroke

glass vessel

echo

wood block

glass xylophone

acoustic string

“douse it” water [line1, :24]

“Light the match” match striking [line1, :28]

“exhausting/wheel” maracas [line7-8, 1:00]

“look inside” creaking [line10, 1:06]

footsteps in the snow, syn starfish [1:19]

fire

“there…the wound” drum [line27, 2:18]

“skin of eyelids” drumsticks on the rim [line30, 2:30] “Last night I felt” fire to the front, over water bowl [line38, 3:26] “reached in” creaking, strain opens [line45, 4:04] “single pour” water over fire [line47, 4:15]

water over all, unwinding

The Spirit Neither Sorts Nor Separates

~pause~

“You know” dead shallow drumbeat, irregular heartbeat [line1, :10] “tangled” cluster [line2, :15]

sing bowl strokes

“separated” slaps [line4, :24]

“type” wood block tap [line9, :40]

“skeletons” from typing to bones [line11, :45]

“We stroked” to “There are things” words no sounds [lines12-15]

“death touches” scraping [line16, 1:10]

“girl / kneeling” rolling harmonics [line17-18, 1:15]

open space, slow heavy breath of sleep

“light”

“tarot” syn low radar [line25, 2:01]

“two cups” bell steps up [line28, 2:06]

“Earth …says”

“The existence…” >silence

“I feel…trashing” thrashing wings, literal [line41, 3:05]

“I do not know” cluster high harmonic [line45, 3:22]

bell punctuation [3:31]

“When he left” latch opens, clothes throw, the woosh of movement in the distance [line47-48, 3:35] the addition of the soundtrack made me doubly aware of doors in the book, when they appear

“your fingers blessing” pages turning, scratch of pen [line52, 3:56]

“disease…”

“shivering” high cicadas [line58-, 4:20]

“making” slow knock [line61-, 4:27]

cirrus layers continue

“See inside…” words no sound [line71, 5:04]

“light” bell [line72, 5:05]

cirrus layers continue

“cartload of x-ray” slapping [line76, 5:27]

“contains the language” fog horn> [line77, 5:38]

Runaway

soft footsteps

high bird calls

church bells, that continue

“burning inside” return of growl cluster [line3, :46]

interval1 = church bells/growl cluster<>/cymbal [1:15-1:39]

“Liquid gases … oracle bones” [lines9-18]

interval2 = to the cacophony, add higher xylophone [2:30-2:45]

“Behind … was the fire…” sounds begin to loop [lines19-21]

interval3 = [2:53-3:15] symphonic

“blackened needles” sound layers pull forward and back, keyboard forward [3:15] interval4 = keyboard up riff forward, add footsteps snow [3:45-4:05] “the fire was thick” add cluster [4:12]

interval5 = [4:33-4:42]

“her heart” <><>cymbal oscillation [5:03..]

interval6 = thins out to high harmonic [5:10-5:25]

“scars on a face” lowest pitch of the piano, ricochet [5:30]

interval7 = [5:35-5:36]

“How the skin…where the color was”

interval8 [6:20-6:34]

“Street signs…then ablaze” recedes momentarily [7ish]

interval9 = [7:05-7:22]

“edge of a blade” blade sharpening [7:33] the blade flattens and extends

interval10 = the bell riff faster, bell incantation, blade [8:40-9:12]

new lower upturned riff stepwise, new high downward piano [9:14-]

interval11 = [9:43-10:05]

“In the newspaper…carries it?” [lines80-93]

interval12 = [11:07-11:30]

“The girl. …my previous life” [lines94-112]

interval13 = [13:10-13:26]

“A feral girl…beyond metaphor” [lines113-117]

interval14 = [13:53-14:10]

“How a runaway girl…Castigates” [lines118-131]

interval15 = [15:22-15:33]

“It does not work…forced open to an O” [lines132-137]

interval16 = [15:58-16:03]

“What is the procedures…Devour” [lines138-147]

interval17 = [16:55-17:05]

“She was calling…leftover bones” [lines148-157]

interval18 = >[17:43-18:17]

That Heart - Time Does Not Exist

<string/harmonics pulsing, layered

“her to stone” xylophone tap [:31]

“too huge yet” cymbal cluster [:55]

[:58-1:07]>

That Heart - Let Me Begin Again

“Let me begin again”

“all I have known” high bell chimes, water [:15-]

“hold the dress up”

“child fort”

[2:00-2:15]>

That Heart - A Flor de Piel

water

dulcimer

pizz

motives have emerged now

“Inside me” dulcimer more saturated [line16, 1:02]

“Blackened needles” clarinet effect, then into its harmonics [line16, 1:06] “forgets” drum enters [line17, 1:08]

interval1 = [1:32-2:30]

string glass, pizz [1:32-]

lower string melody, reluctant winding [1:54-2:28]

“The mark” cymbal [line24, 2:33]

“Her body sutures” lower string melody [line26, 2:34-]

“(Something sobbed” >only lower string remains. Velvet. [line32, 3:02]

“The small flame …petals” words no sounds [line33, 3:04-3:18]

“flowing” high harmonics [line37, 3:18]

“She was…” words no sounds [line39, 3:27-]

“Only the spirit” high harmonic [line42, 3:40-]

“blackened” xyloph [line50, 4:07]

interval2 = [4:21-6:20]

strings forward, moves to sigh [5:22-] this is the first location of solidity

layers of harmonics, ebbing, then turning up and stretching

xylophone/chimes/bell

reduced back to empty [6:17]

then strings again

~silence~

birds in the distance [6:29]

wings beating [6:45]

“…joy?” cello fragments, tubular bells [line57, 6:58-]

“[ … ]”

interval3 = [line78, 8:07-8:31]

“[ … ]” cello answers itself with the second gesture [line81, 8:40] “for moment” cello answers again [line81, 8:41]

“In that heart” words no sounds [line83]