The box set includes a numbered print of the limited edition, sound art cassette, a re-release of the original chapbook “The Front Lines of the War,” as well as hand-made materials and inserts. The coda is included as an insert, hand-printed on natural fiber paper made by an indigenous women’s collective in Chiapas, Mexico, and a unique distressing process for the cassette boxes, which parallels the element of randomness and glitching that is central to the production ethos of the album.
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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
In the shatter zone too long,
I too become brittle, partitioned, fissured,
carved by faults
corrugated by mountain ranges
borders divide me
and I flow
to divergent watersheds
disconnected from any center.
Roads run through me,
rivers run into walls,
I am displaced
along a trail of cheap hotels,
young girls always on offer down the hall
through a doorway
stained with the grime of hands—
traveling without books,
digesting words and miles
like the tribes who wrote their languages
on skins or buckwheat cakes, then
ate them when on the run and starving…
words become bodies,
bodies become words,
till every footstep sings
the face of earth.
I want to drink wine
made by women chewing millet
and spitting it in a gourd to ferment—
but they don’t sell the home-made stuff
in the bus depots, so
I buy factory liquor
laced with formaldehyde
to lubricate the ruts and gears of the road
as I turn like a cog in the apparatus
of machine administration,
as wheels and gears turn in me,
a synchromesh of distance, far vectors, exhaustion,
a simultaneity of
estrangement and belonging,
my wild desire for borders and margins
to push against and surpass,
and my saner, secret wish
for centeredness, connection,
the slow symbiosis of self
into a single piece of earth,
into a single love and lover.
I offer my bottle
to the man next to me on the bus,
he drains the last few drops
and chucks it out the window
to the cornfields,
as if innocent any concept of litter or pollution,
as if human endeavor and design
could never be detached
from the flowing landscape we flow through,
as if he knows
a factory bottle is a particle
of industrial production
that travels through the world
both discrete and interconnected,
just like you and me—
If I go further
it’s just because I can’t be still
when others are lock-stepped
into forced migrations,
cocked weapons of assimilation
jabbed into their backs—
cultures filtered through steel prisms
of diffraction and dispersion,
struggling against the current
of automatic expansion, infinite consumption,
like salmon trying to swim upstream
to reach the source where they were born,
but someone has reversed the flow
a bait-and-switch in which
displaced peoples are stranded on a stony shore
instead of arriving at the home
they’ve migrated lifetimes to reach.
❖
Anyway, tell me
which place on earth
is not a shatter zone,
mosaic of
cultures, languages, tribes?
Where are skin and soil not
cracked, broken, thick with blood and salt?
If you don’t recognize the violence
you’re complicit to,
that’s just because it’s
smoothed with petroleum butter,
flattened by a steam roller
for us to drive and drive
as the world burns
in some far place.
❖
Like a salmon I crossed the sea
but I reached no sanctuary, no home,
only a further shatter zone
where life was a watch shop in a strip mall,
seconds ticking blandly towards oblivion,
gleaming with gold and jewels,
memory was a blade that cut itself,
a machined edge to eviscerate the past,
bleed away all that was not anodyne, orthodox,
while violence was camouflaged
with shades of comfort and convenience,
and stitched in the logo of a shirt.
In the shatter zone too long
I too become a continent of divisions,
my only wholeness is the rhythm of the sea
that carries me away in waves—but
it’s just temporality,
a soft-shoe shuffle,
and all the guns and mortars,
all the jet planes and grenades,
are on their way
to the bottom of the sea,
sea of
foam and salt
lime and clay
urchins and cetaceans
heartbeats and heartbreak
and everything between,
where we abide
beneath
waves of transformation
waves of sex and death
waves of violence and the sea
waves of you and me.
An omnivore of sound, lover of monophonic plainchants, noise, and the dérive, Will Klingenmeier has spent the last fifteen
years living as a borderline hermit developing a distinct sonic palate. He is a sound artist placing emphasis on indeterminacy, code, field recordings and synthesis....more
Striking! Initially somewhat frustrated by this because several of the tracks are very short and just as I was getting into them they ended. Turns out, after many listens, it's brilliantly composed. Will Klingenmeier
A lush and lovely record that's evocative and immersive. Let the granular textures pour over you like ocean waves. It's been a regular of my listening for months now. Will Klingenmeier
I've always enjoyed music that you can't put a distinct genre on, you can't quite tell what instruments you're hearing and that's timeless. This release has all of that and is a treat to listen to. Will Klingenmeier
In the music of Paul Jordan, digitally manipulated field recordings become striking electronic songs that feel eerie and surreal. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 7, 2020
Recorded before a live audience, these compositions leverage the strengths of two ambient masters into a hypnotic 18-track set. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 25, 2024
Moody dark ambient from Dahlia’s Tear, the expansive sounds on “Through the Nightfall Grandeur” are as melancholy as they are unsettling. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 16, 2018
