Writer – Jacqueline Turner

Jacqueline Turner

There wasn’t a lot of info on Jacqueline Turner that I could find, but I did find something interesting. It was the events that happen in a morning of Ms. Turner. This post showed what goes through her mind when writing in the morning, and what she does to prepare for this task. She starts off by saying that her morning does not contain a consistent ritual. She says that her mind works differently from most writers; when she starts developing some kind of consistent pattern, her contrary nature suggests breaking it. I found this to be really cool because it shows that she doesn’t just sit down start writing for hours and hours and BAM – MASTERPIECE! No, she gets a cup of coffee (one of the only consistent parts of her mornings), and starts making a list of words; being “barely awake”. I found this to be kinda weird because what kind of words would she use to possibly make a list (:S). Well, she does, and that’s what works for her. After making her list, her next move is based on an idea she gets from reading something by Harryette Mullen: “Sleeping with the Dictionary”. I’m not sure if this is a book or an insert of some kind, but she uses it to guide her. The list she has is actually used to get her out of jams; if she gets stuck, she takes a word from her list. Now THAT makes a lot more sense doesn’t it? She ends off by saying basically, she sits at her laptop with her word list and coffee, tries not to spill the coffee, and just starts writing. I like her style, it’s really free and open; not really any restrictions on her and she’s just really chill about everything. I read some of her work in “Seven into Eleven” and I found it to be really interesting. She can go anywhere from a 20 word piece, to a 200 word piece. Some of her pieces I found a little confusing, but others were real mind bogglers. Her piece “glutton” is really attractive. The way she wrote it was really impelling, and it finished in what I thought was 3 seconds. It got me lost in time, and it really wasn’t about anything “big”; just someone drinking wine, maybe beer, and eating chocolate with some whipped cream. I think that when someone can talk about something as simple as eating and make people feel lost in time while doing it, they’ve really captured the art of poetry.

Second Investigation: The Element Choir

The Element Choir – Element  1

First off, “Element 1” was really freaky, and a little disturbing to listen to. Either way, I actually liked it. I liked the feeling of being freaked out by this song because it actually had the sounds of the element wind in it. It had some hoots from owls which also added the eerie effect to this, which affected me a lot more than if the track didn’t include the hooting. The people screaming or moaning or whatever they were doing in the background didn’t help the cause at ALL. It was as if I was stuck in a horror movie, and I was the idiot that stayed in the house after everybody left knowing they were going to die. The funny thing once again is, I still enjoyed the piece. The Element choir has some structured, and even some un-structured pieces which are based on a system of conduction cues. This is an ensemble of people that include: concert sopranos, poets, singer songwriters, Japanese folk singers (:S), composers, and musicians. What inspires this group, is textures of sounds, voice techniques, rhythmic patterns, and even sound poetry. I like how this group has many different kinds of sound artists, just like DJ Food. It’s smart because when dealing with more than one kind of sound artist, all their techniques and thoughts on sound could be brought together to make some pretty magical pieces. The similarity of this group and other sound artists is the fact that they use sounds to make something happen. I couldn’t really think of similarities. Differences however, are plentiful. This group brings in something as simple as an owl’s hoot, and incorporates that in to their piece, which clearly caught my attention, and gave me the chills. This group also tries to explore the musical history of some sounds, which I feel is pretty awesome. And yeah basically this group was enjoyable to listen to. I don’t know if I would want to continue listening to other pieces of theirs because of the feeling this gave me, but I can’t judge the group on one freaky song. :O

First Investigation: DJ Food

DJ Food (found on Ubu Web) – Raiding the 20^th Century

This was an AMAZING track to listen to. Dj Food is a group, whose goal was to provide metaphorical food for DJ’s. This was a really cool idea to me because after hearing their track, I could see how successful this group was. I thought that DJ Food was one person, but in fact it is a whole bunch of DJ’s, producers and musicians working together to make these tracks. I’m still trying to take in how good the “Raiding the 20^th Century” track was. It had a little Jay-Z in there which I thought was SMART. Anyways, it looks like their inspirations came from other DJs, and for this song in particular all the mash ups that were posted from other DJ’s. A mash up is sorta like a remix, but it has a lot of songs put together to make one mega song. In this particular one, they took the 20^th Century sound (the thing that pops up at the end of shows like the Simpsons) and added sounds and songs to it, to make a mega song. Their influences also of course must be from other musicians, because of the songs they added in this, and the style they chose to add them in. They are similar to other sound artists because they’re using the same style that many DJs and musicians use. They had some record scratches to add effect, which is similar to many other songs. The differences however are really interesting. These guys took something that nobody usually thinks about; the 20^th Century sound, and added that at the beginning of the piece. Shortly after playing that however, they get right in to running their beats, and interesting lyrics. Overall this has made me want to look for more songs or tracks that DJ Food has released, and I feel that EVERYBODY should listen to these guys, they’re C-R-A-Z-Y.

John Cage Investigation

John Cage seems like a very intellectual person. I like how he sees things a little differently than most people like his thought that laughter and sound don’t have to mean anything, but can be so intriguing. He listens to traffic, as do I when I go to sleep at night because my window faces the DVP, and the sound of traffic does honestly change every day, whereas Beethoven and Mozart all sound the same to me as he said. John Cage was a composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, and printmaker. His major influences and perhaps his inspiration came from various Eastern cultures. He studied Indian philosophy, and apparently this inspired him as well. Something I found interesting was the fact that he had a composition that didn’t even have a single note. The goal of the piece was for people to hear the sounds of the environment, rather than say they had 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence (and the piece was called 4’33). The only similarity that I can think of with Mr. Cage and other sound artists are: they listen to music, and sounds. Mr. Cage takes the sounds further, whereas most sound artists (I’m talking about singers specifically) sing the songs and most likely don’t give second thoughts to the exact sounds. That would be one of the differences, that Mr. Cage takes sounds further and investigated those sounds to a high extent. Another difference, but talking about modern artists and Mr. Cage, is that he has a lot more experience and wisdom in a sense. I can tell from the way he talks about sounds, that he knows what he is talking about and that really made me keep tuning in to what he was saying because at first, I thought this was going to be 5 minutes of pure boredom, but the video finished and I felt like I actually only listened to it for a minute. Overall, I think I would be interested to hear more of what he has to say.