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June 3, 2021
Miranda Mellis's and Katie Aymar's Playlists for the Poetry Collection "Demystifications"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Miranda Mellis's Demystifications is another brilliant and thought-invoking collection from one of my favorite poets.
Robert Glück wrote of the book:
"Demystifications is a circle of keys, a florilegium, a circle of voices engaged in a public conversation whose subject is the transformation of knowledge into a collective organ. Mellis uses aphorism to bring us back to basics—what is the best way to proceed, starting from here? How should we inhabit the present? By excavation, by error, by exaggeration, by gesture, by revolt, by contradiction, by voice, by tone. Fanny Howe and Edward Said, Etel Adnan, Karl Marx and Muriel Rukeyser—Miranda Mellis hosts the living and the dead in a grand conference on the value and practice of wisdom."
In her words, here is Miranda Mellis's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Demystifications:
Miranda Mellis (author) playlist for Demystifications
Purple Mountains, David Berman
David Berman died in August 2019, a month after this album came out, and it is unlike any record I’ve ever listened to, in being so sad, a last will and testament, but also so ecstatic, musically. These are songs of farewell, parting messages in the key of de-: de-idealization, de-pression, and de-mystification. Berman composes a phenomenology of disappointment; an epistemology of loss. His lyrics are fables and laments, but they are also puns, philosophy, and argument. “You got storyline fever, storyline flu/ Apparently impairing your point of view/It's making horseshit sound true to you/Now it's impacting how you're acting too.” The human condition, in a nutshell.
Supersonic, J.J. Fad
A lyric from Supersonic went through my head when I was writing the second demystification, which is about anticipating what someone might be about to say, or hearing what isn’t said, or not hearing what is said, the necessary polyvocality of listening. The lyric is: “They can hear what I say faster than I can say it.” Here receptivity borders on telepathy. The transition from speaking to hearing can be kaleidoscopic, as if every time we talk we might be playing the “game of telephone,” either because of projections, or intimacy, or distraction, or eagerness.
It’s Gonna Rain, Steve Reich
This canonical, experimental, process-oriented collaged composition centers on a sample taken from a sermon on the story of Noah’s ark by a Pentecostal preacher, Brother Walter. The relentless refrain of the sample, “it’s gonna rain,” intensifies his warning, redolent with fear and exaltation. Reich builds an arc (ark) of repetition into cacophony. The piece itself is a musical flood, a natural disaster of sound, focalizing the element of insistence. He builds out from the sample, cutting it away from its context but not to decontextualize it, rather to amplify it. In Demystifications samples are not intended to be de-territorialized, de-familiarized, or fragmented, but rather I sound their meanings by putting them in different waters.
Impermanence, Meredith Monk
The music and choreography of Impermanence make the quotidian, the ordinary gesture their form; in their compressed brevities, these pieces link for me with the spirit of Demystifications. Dancing between platitude and poetry, the “stanzas,” so to speak, or refrains, of Monk’s choreography of Impermanence are of a paradoxical nature: If the most important things disappear, so do the least important things. Nothing is not impermanent. Relatedly, Gaston Bachelard writes, in The Poetics of Space, “The human psyche contains nothing that is insignificant.” The last line in the book, in demystification 99, is from Edward Said: “Regard all experiences as if they were about to disappear.”
Katie Aymar (visual indexer for the book) playlist for Demystifications
SWIM, Holly Herndon
Holly Herndon has a conceptually driven music practice, and this song, from her most recent album Proto, was created with an AI or a machine learning process trained on her and a set of collaborators’ voices. Human voice fragments form a layered palette of sound into which she harmonizes the melody, against a thudding heartbeat-like rhythm in the background. Despite its aural density, and the incorporation of glitchy, mechanical-sounding samples, the landscape of the song is spacious and almost devotional. Lyrics evoke connection without ever elaborating the subjects/objects of the song, “I feel inside touching inside / We have an endless sadness / To watch the world dissolve.” Holly Herndon’s own writing about the technologies she uses and the ethical implications of creative automation remind me of passages in Demystifications that hold a tension between creative optimism and anxiety about predetermining the future (see demystification 88).
Ravel, Wume
I was puzzling over whether this song was named for the French composer or for the word itself (which can mean either to tangle or untangle). It turns out the song was created by chopping up and manipulating digital loops of Maurice Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau,” a shimmery, drifting piece for solo piano intended to evoke the impression of flowing water. Wume’s electronic composition is created from many simple, persistent parts that develop into a driving and deeply textured instrumental. As the rhythmic complexity intensifies, notes seem to bend and sound detuned. The song’s deconstruction and refraction of patterns drawn from a classical piece connect to the style of “commonplacing” throughout Demystifications and recall the epigraph’s pair of quotes about additive and subtractive processes.
Arabesque 3, Harold Budd
In this ambient song, a saxophone trills a wistful melody, and a piano circles over a dreamy tone. It starts and ends with the swelling of that tone, anchoring in an overcast space that is melancholy and emotive. The quality of the song is minimal but lush and feels like an element I find throughout Demystifications, as in demystification 49, which moves from “what we perceive together dissolves us into connection” to “[i]n a hundred years, we will all have been ‘replaced.’”
4 Skies, Arto Lindsay
In this collaboration with Brian Eno and Amedeo Pace from O Corpo Sutil (The Subtle Body), Arto Lindsay’s phrasing feels delicate against the guitar’s shuffling melody, suffused with doom. The lyrics are enigmatic, packed with descriptions that make the atmosphere into a strange object: “The sky like a room at the top of a house” or “Why do we feel / Like it might break? / A seething, crumpled, teeming sky.” The instrumentals build before breaking into a quietly abrasive resolution. The mood and defamiliarized natural imagery in this song connect to threads in Demystifications, as in demystification 3, where a giant building turns back into a forest, or demystification 6: “The trees slide uphill, greenly.”
Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications (Solid Objects, 2021); The Instead, a book-length dialogue with Emily Abendroth (Carville Annex, 2016); The Quarry (Trafficker Press, 2013); The Spokes (Solid Objects, 2012); None of This Is Real (Sidebrow Press, 2012); Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2009); and The Revisionist (Calamari Press, 2007).
Her stories and essays have appeared in various publications including Harper’s, The Believer, Conjunctions, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, McSweeney’s and elsewhere. Look for her seasonal column, The Trinocular, at The Believer. She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Millay Colony. She was a co-founding editor of The Encyclopedia Project with Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz and currently teaches writing, literature, and environmental humanities at The Evergreen State College.
Katie Aymar is a visual artist and aspiring naturalist living in Southern California. She graduated with an interdisciplinary B.A. from The Evergreen State College (Olympia, WA). Past indexing collaborations with Miranda Mellis include The Encyclopedia Project and The Instead.
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