Dusted Reviews Artist: Sogar Album: Stengel Label: List Review date: Apr. 1, 2003

[Note: This was released August, 2002. The reviews are out there. The following is a sampledelic hallucination: sonically remixed words. Granulated samples: JN, DFW, and WG. I am reminded by what Laura Marks says in her new book, Touch: "In turn, my writing about [art, film, etc.] actualizes the virtual states in which these works exist...Art and writing constitute a sort of connective tissue among material entities separate in place and time... No need to interpret, only to unfold, to increase the surface area of experience" (pp. x-xi); Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.]

It was a crystal feather.

She dropped down from the flight, into the garden of snow. Crystalline snowflakes drifted across her cheeks: and she was warm. Her feet, hovering, above a sequined vista of shimmering white, danced to sine wave rhythms of solitude.

A giant open eyelid. In the blue-black sky that radiated light breathed to life pinpoints of fire: pulsars. Orange rays traveled horizontally from the horizon to illuminate the snow white ground with intersecting parallel lines of orange. Faint hues mixed between orange, white, blue. The pulsars sent down streams of light, and with that light, came sound.

And a feather.

She took it to her tongue.

Her body now a sinewave: her body now a rhythm: every breath the pulse of the heavenly fire of the firmament radiating from a harmony known only to the madness of philosophers who proclaimed the music of the spheres.

She was able to rotate objects in her mind. It was her unique ability.

Not lists but soundobjects. Pulsar sounds. Beams of light that descended fractalized levels of infinite spirals, revealing multicoloured grains moving through unfathomable breadths. The closer she tried to approach a slivered grain, the more it felt like she had forgotten where it was she was moving; the more she tried to remember where a grain had gone, the less she could see of it.

The radiance of silver from the sun – this came to her later.

She turns to me. "Do you know," she says, watching the sound glint from a translucent feather, "that we are in smooth space?"

There is another word: another word that is what is already that which is: this word is synesthesia.

"They won't understand," she says, handing me the feather. "They will call for Judgement. Not touch."

Had she said it sooner than there would not have been what had to happen.

The sky exploded in shards of ice that cut the luminescent air. We were suspended above a slow moving image that screamed toward us: a collage of figures, blurred, barely freeze-framed, advancing second by second:

a phalanx of black cloaked women and men, running in a tight formation, past the burning truck on the left, street littered with glass and metal canisters, the sidewalk far on the right seeping a slow drip – in red – slow drip – down the curve of the street's culvert – it dripped – to the drain – slow dripping – the red

By tobias c. van Veen

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