PennSound Daily

Both shows are content-dense yet remarkably intimate, with Bronk offering poems at his own pace and Lyman posing questions, often hinging on a certain turn of phrase or image, as they come to him. Sometimes they're quick exchanges, sometimes protracted. Lyman isn't afraid to needle, and Bronk is willing to tussle as well — at one point, he says "I'm not going to tell you what the light is," then, after a pregnant pause, adds, "you know what the light is!" — and occasionally, if the edit's a bit too tight, it almost feels like Bronk offering his dissension to the line of questioning by moving on to the next poem, but that only makes the back-and-forth more charming. Both are fine examples of why we find public radio compelling, and, of course, recorded poetry as well: there's nothing more than human voices and the breathing space between them, and that's enough. Play one (or both) of these programs through a good set of speakers, sit back, and get carried away for half an hour. Click here to start listening.

I met Peter Lamborn Wilson in the late '80s at Naropa Institute, and after acquiring his pamphlet Chaos, written under the takhallus Hakim Bey, became a devotee to his work. His support of DIY efforts was encouraging and validating, and We Press took up the invitation to "pirate" Chaos by way of corporate resources we had at our disposal at the time. 

After falling in and out of touch over the years, on a visit to Woodstock in 2013 I learned he now resides there. Less than a year later — two days after my family moved to the Hudson Valley in August 2014 — I found my way to a poetry reading featuring Wilson, Sparrow, and Michael Brownstein at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock. Knowing him primarily as a cultural critic and writer of prose, to hear Wilson's verse was something new, and a delight. 

In March 2015, seeking a collaborative project, I discussed doing a recording session with him. He brought up the six hundred pages of unpublished poems, suggesting we could document them. Having high regard for his writing, knowing his work as a poet is essentially unknown beyond the circle of people who are part of his community, this was a grand idea, and something different than any other previous audio project I'd done before: focusing on the work of a single poet over a course of many weeks. For one thing, the duration, scale, and informal approach enabled a series of routines to develop. Some were minor, some technical and pragmatic, and others symbolic. I decided, for example, to bring a different piece of small visual art along to each of our nine sessions, to "keep us company" and temporarily transform decor in his studio apartment during the many hours we spent at work on our endeavor.

Funkhouser would go on to supplement this impressive body of work with a 2019 recording of the book Hoodoo Metaphysics read in its entirety, and after news of Wilson's passing spread, he contacted us and sent along three additional recordings: a 2016 reading with Charles Stein at the Hudson Opera House and a pair of 2015 recordings from the Woodstock Public Library and Olana State Historic Site. We are grateful, as ever, to Funkhouser for his passionate work as an archivist and send our condolences to Wilson's friends, family, and fans.

We start this new week off by taking a look at one of the most remarkable series housed on our PennSound Cinema page: Robert Ashley's seven-part "opera for television," Music with Roots in the Aether. We've hosted a copy of this series for many years, and replaced our original lo-fi copies with new remasters in January 2011. Here's how Ashley describes his ambitious project, first released in 1974:

Music with Roots in the Aether is a music-theater piece in color video. It is the final version of an idea that I had thought about and worked on for a few years: to make a very large collaborative piece with other composers whose music I like. The collaborative aspect of Music with Roots in the Aether is in the theater of the interviews, at least primarily, and I am indebted to all of the composers involved for their generosity in allowing me to portray them in this manner.

The piece turns out to be, in addition, a large-scale documentation of an important stylistic that came into American concert music in about 1960. These composers of the "post-serial" / "post-Cage" movement have all made international reputations for the originality of their work and for their contributions to this area of musical compositions.

The style of the video presentation comes from the need I felt to find a new way to show music being performed. The idea of the visual style of Music with Roots in the Aether is plain: to watch as closely as possible the action of the performers and to not "cut" the seen material in any way — that is, to not editorialize on the time domain of the music through arbitrary space-time substitutions.

The visual style for showing the music being made became the "theater" (the stage) for the interviews, and the portraits of the composers were designed to happen in that style.