Gene Coleman’s “Water Of The Last Moment” & PJ’s “Dis/Aster”

Composer Gene Coleman just posted the first 10 minutes of his composition “Water Of The Last Moment” which constituted the opening section of “The Gulf (between you and me)” commissioned by The Crossing and for which I wrote the texts.  Gene added the following note:

This is the first 10′ from this work for 24 voices, Sho and Live Electronics. It was commissioned by The Crossing for their project called “The Gulf (between you and me)”. Along with the 24 voices of The Crossing are Ko Ishikawa (sho), with Toshimaru Nakamura and Adam Vidiksis (live electronics). The text was created by Pierre Joris, with some additional words in Japanese added by me. The recording is from the premiere in Philadelphia on June 15th, 2013 conducted by Donald Nally.

You can listen to this on Soundcloud, here.

The poem (partly) used in this section is called Dis/Aster and was published on Jerome Rothenberg’s Poems and Poetics blog and can be read here, while the opening stanzas are given below:

Disaster: not thought gone awry

when all this first started
            my body broke out into real bad rashes
my eyes my face my neck my chest my back my shoulders
big giant holes on the back of my legs,
holes the size of a #2 pencil
looked just like the holes
in the fish
in the lab
on the slab

Gulf: from Greek κόλπος (kólpos) m. [masculine], a bosom, From Proto-European *bheu-ə– :“to swell, bend, curve”

 

What have you done to know disaster?

            we went to detox —December 11 to January 12

                        the children feel much better now
                                                Alina still has bad days
she may never be 100%
my little boy is doing fantastic,
my husband’s better &
I’m feeling better too…
I’ve shelled out $40.000

Gulf: A hollow place in the Earth

 

Disaster is on the side of forgetting

we did blue crab before BP
            but since BP
we don’t blue crab anymore

Gulf: An abyss, a bottomless or unfathomed depth

 

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