The Axial Band

The Axial Band
Axial Music & Glossodelia

David Arner (keyboard & percussion)

John Beaulieu (keyboard & electronics)

George Quasha (percussion)
Charles Stein (voice)

Sunday, December 14th, 2014
3:00pm
at the home of George Quasha & Susan Quasha
124 Station Hill Rd.
Barrytown, New York
RSVP is helpful to our planning but not required

The Axial Band has been performing together since 2010, including performances Upstate and in NYC.

Here link to recent performances now online:
The Axial Band (Arner, Beaulieu, Quasha, Stein) at White Box, NYC: https://vimeo.com/48916974

AXIAL MUSIC: Performance follows a principle of spontaneous interpersonal composition without the intention of following precedent or previous patterns, guided instead by radical following of actual sounds and proto-language generated in an intentional field. When successful the sound/language event has a life independent of the musicians/poets and may generate an altered state of listening. In addition to sound events and proto-language components, the performance sometimes has a visual dimension with video and/or the creation of live axial drawings. Language and music become difficult at times to distinguish, like listening to strange tribal sounds in the distance and being unclear as to whether one is hearing language. Of course all this happens in life anyway, but for the most part unintentionally and below the radar.

The axial principle indicates that an event may be radically centered in the actual moment of sound/language/image generation in such a way that we—artists and audience alike—are asked to respond to sensorialy accessible singularity. Our own response then is originary and we are “proprioceptively” enactive of self and other as novel experience. The theory is that reorienting ourselves and our world-sensing to an expectation of the unexpectable or to the radically un-pre-identified is a force with evolutionary potential within mindbody. It may generate a psychophysical still point in which all patterning is suspended and the possibility of reframing experience, indeed of healing, is opened anew.

GLOSSODELIA: Literally, “revealing tongues.” The musicians/poets enter into a state of co-performative inquiry by way of what they use for language. This includes just about anything that can be generated in real (and hyperreal) time, such as sound, text, spoken word, gesture, and a range of semi-definable electronic phenomena (“electronic linguistics”). What they generate through various instruments (“psychotropic languaging vehicles”) becomes a field of strange attractors (“dynamical lingualia”) with a pull toward possible language realities (“lingualities”). Call it a pulsational conversation with stepped-up intensity in which Real Time is invited to show its other side. The confusion of language and music means that each may be viewed as the other.

Note: “Glossodelic attractors,” a term invented by G. Quasha for a performance with Gary Hill at the opening of the latter’s retrospective at the Henry Gallery in Seattle (2012), suggests a range of meanings from the etymologies “glosso-” (fr. Greek “language, tongue”) and “-delic” (fr. Greek “make manifest, visible”) and resonates with “glossolalia” and “psychedelic.” “Attractors,” in addition to the mathematical meaning of “a set towards which a dynamical system evolves over time (e.g., strange attractor),” connects with the “-tropic” part of ‘psychotropic’—attractors that orient the mind, turn the mind in a new direction. Co-performative work involves singular initiations into dynamical/lingual events. As metanoiac languaging vehicles such work reorients the mind by altering our conception of what language is. They attract possible language realities—or, rather, “lingualities.”