F.M.R.L. reviewed by Tomoe Hill on Minor Literature[s]

I was so pleased to read Tomoe Hill’s review of F.M.R.L., published earlier this week on Minor Literature[s]. You can really tell when a writer and a keen reader writes reviews…

[…] In some ways, to say it is a book does it a disservice, although of course it takes the physical form. Words in lines, on pages, familiar structures. But there is a magical disorder to all of these which reveals the logic from its listener-writer as well as creating a new one from the reader’s perspective: those of sound and word, meaning and memory. To read, in this instance is to open someone’s mind and play with the thoughts within, and then delve into your own to discover a kinship.
Her pages are filled with spiralling thoughts, questions that are so imbedded in us – perhaps even assumed unanswerable – that to dissect their nature seems a path to madness sometimes […]

Read the whole review here:

http://minorliteratures.com/2015/09/10/f-m-r-l-by-daniella-cascella-tomoe-hill/

 

reFMRL / curating, conversing, drifting

reFMRL is a series of events for which I’ve asked artists, writers, performers, musicians to remix, rewrite, re-read my book: to use the book as raw material. I’m doing this to challenge the frustrating conventional format of the book launch (where two or three people praise a book that nobody else in the room has read), to work with the book as material presence instead, and to enhance the polyphonies that inhabit and shape F.M.R.L.

2 June: Bergen, Østre. With Jeremy Welsh, Conrad Kemp+Maia Urstad, Signe Lidén.

6 June: London, Hardy Tree Gallery, Mahu. 
With Christian Patracchini, Eleanor Vonne Brown, Georgia Rodger, Helena Hunter, Jess Chandler, Mark Peter Wright.

 

25 June: Resonance104.4FM. With Salomé Voegelin and guest voices.

20 July: London, Café Oto. With Christian Patracchini, Colin Potter, David Toop, Elaine Mitchener, Georgia Rodger, James Wilkes, 
Natasha Soobramanien, Patrick Farmer
, Richard Skinner, Rie Nakajima, Salomé Voegelin, Steven J Fowler.

Following last year’s Writing Sound 2 in Bergen and the sense of drift that motivated it and moved it, reFMRL lets the book drift into unpredictable sounds, activities and voices. Curating as a generative activity, rather than a controlled one with predictable results. Curating (like my approach to writing in F.M.R.L.) as channelling, unstable arrangement, transmission and interference.

A few years ago I stopped curating because its contingent demands and constraints had become more and more distant from my initial motives: eventually curating prevented me from writing and asked for a level of control beyond my inclinations and ideas. Then I knew I had to stop.
When I started curating in the late 1990s, it was because of and for writing and because of and for conversations, held in most part as interviews for a music magazine I contributed to. These conversations would end up in a text, they would generate writing and in parallel, they would generate invites for some of my interlocutors to present their work within a series of projects. It was not about displaying: it was another instalment in the conversations, brought into a public context. Today I also start to see curating as a series of performed conversations.
I treasure those encounters and I long for those conversations—the time spent before, during and after, the commitment, the exhilaration and complicity as well as the misunderstandings, dead ends, again, the drifts, to generate and let grow, wait and see what takes form, edit, think, write. I’m looking for them again in this year’s new projects, reFMRL and two more, one bringing reading and translating to a sound art gallery, the other bringing sound, voices and listening to a literature centre. They appear as the inner lining of writing: the counter-space of writing, the space of my intermittent silences where I’m less concerned with plans and control than with listening to the words, voices and sounds of others, from which more words will emerge and contribute again to more conversations and to other writing.

Esprit d’F.M.R.L.

The following words appear at some point in my new book F.M.R.L. They hold the book’s drive, they have prompted most of my new texts over the last few months and they are the closest I can get to saying how I’ve been trying to write.

*

Let these words: curl, wither. Let them be heard in their thinning. Let me syphon them boney, let me drain them until a skeletal presence is left, no tomes, no weight, only necessary filament-words to creep up and haunt the secret thickness of thoughts.
I no longer write much and sometimes I no longer write. Because I could not be clear I got here. For the well-determined minds I descended and drowned in the waters of wordy. For the well-determined thoughts I drowned in the narrow well of linear. Determined by their thoughts I drowned and descended. The well-determined mind, the consequential. The, well, determined wordy mind that overwhelms. Well determined wordy linear writing, when my words began to find their withering ways I would stare at the knots on the page and think of you. What great conviction, what clarity. I was repelled into silence. And what did I do when aphasic temptation came?
What I did: I received it, as it silently moved subterraneous and eroded these words.

 

F.M.R.L., 24 April 2015

My new book, F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound, will be published on 24 April. 
More details and updates to follow on this blog. 

Listening into writing, reading into writing take shape in F.M.R.L. through a collection of short texts, fragments and deranged essays, with attention to pacing and linguistic derives. An archive of books, notebooks, events and records prompts the texts in these pages, responding to encounters with Michel Leiris’s autobiographical fictions; concerts and events at Café Oto and the Swedenborg House in London; visits to museums such as the Pitt Rivers in Oxford and exhibitions such as Ice Age Art at the British Museum, among the others. 
The attention dwells on the peripheral—accidents of hearing, recalled stories, detours of thought—rather than any assumed core, up to the point when the very core of the book becomes what is normally deemed peripheral. Taking its title from Louis Aragon, F.M.R.L. (Ephemeral: Frenzy, Madness, Reverie, Love) is ‘a recording of a three-year long improvisation in writing’: it reclaims the complexity and intermittent incoherence in listening and reading, and it works with their residual aspects addressing reference, canons, issues of authenticity and fabulation, degrees of opacity and transparency, across languages and cultures. F.M.R.L. makes claims for confusion and unexpected minutiae rather than supporting any grand, encompassing narrative of listening. It is not concerned with making sense univocally, but with exploring possibilities for meaning and for writing sound.
 F.M.R.L. is a book constructed across sonic patterns, assonance, repetitions, comprising texts that intermittently drift from sense to sound and to nonsense and back. A flip from the immateriality of sound to the sounds of letters and words as material, a call from reading to voicing.

 
‘Daniela Cascella is the most literary listener I know. In the frenzy of ephemera collected here, she catches echoes between films and philosophy, sculpture and drama, music and novels. Grounded in French surrealism, Italian narrative, and American poetry, F.M.R.L. auscultates books by some of the most magical writers from the past century: Clarice Lispector, Gert Jonke, and — above all — Michel Leiris. In the process, Cascella investigates the very logic of sound: its recursiveness; its decay; its interference patterns and resonant sympathies. Attending to the blur of voices into noise at the borders of understanding, Cascella gives back the songs of sound’s extended techniques, transmuting noise back into poetry at the borders of these pages. F.M.R.L. is a Passagen-werk of the inner ear’.
Craig Dworkin, author of No Medium (MIT Press, 2013)

In F.M.R.L., each reader enters a different labyrinth. Frictions, murmurings, resonances, laconisms. Retune your listening. Fractures, metamorphoses, residues, lingerings. Reconcile yourself with the ephemeral nature of sound. Fabulations, marginalia, recollections, labyrinths. Revel in invention based on error. Daniela Cascella’s F.M.R.L. is, to turn one of her citations into an emblem of her project: “a site of confusion and heightened perception, a site of deep time.” Against the cognitive traps of syllogistic discourse she offers a celebration of the sundry accidents and errors of listening, each one an inspiration to write. She asks: “And what shall I do with my heritage of listening?” I answer: “Continue to share it with us!”
Allen S. Weiss, author of Varieties of Audio Mimesis (Errant Bodies, 2008) and Zen Landscapes (Reaktion Books, 2013).

This is writing in its most present sense. Writing that, true to its tense, enacts a continual process of thinking and perceiving. Writing that, spinning its words from sound, gathers up referents in a loose weave. Expansive in scope, and intimate in scale, this is writing where reading dwells in the reverie of detail—and deserves our full attention. 
Kristen Kreider, author of Poetics and Place (IB Tauris, 2013)

 

 

book sequence

After testing 3 sequences for my book, this looks like a possible final one. Except for a 10,000-word file of collected fragments which hasn’t found its place yet…

F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound.

 

the missing link

There was a missing link in my book, and today I found it:

Giacinto Scelsi’s Fifth String Quartet, in memoriam Henri Michaux.

Beginnings that begin nothing, writings with and without sound but always listening, another border.

My book plan is complete.