Royalty-free music for professional licensing

direct link: Ink Ocean - version 2

You might not hear all the subtleties in this piece unless you're listening on headphones. But on speakers has a kind of spooky quality, well... as spooky my too sweet and too high voice can get :-).

Ink Ocean: Brenda Clews, poetry, reading, mix; music (mixed by me), Alphacore, 'side_project,' from "Side Project":http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/33504, and Extra's, 'The Quickest Vessel to a Distant Future,' from "Water Every Full Moon": http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/45140 (with permissions)

A version I am happier with - it's darker, and, with the whispering, intense, and perhaps gets to the feelings of the oil spill, and those kinds of pollutions in our lives, and love in the midst of that - in the world we've created, or something like that! Lots of levels in this piece, lots going on, hesitate to give any aspect dominance in a short description.

From Ocean Words

Where the poem began... which you can read here if you wish.



mixed media on canvas




                                          

direct link: Ink Ocean (version 1)

Ink Ocean (9:47min), a poem I've been working on since the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico earlier in the year, a darker, more troubled piece on love. Is it a good ending for my album of love poems? Not sure, though it is a love poem - loving amidst the pollution, with our wounds, whatever they may be. The reading was difficult since I live over a subway, and kept stopping the speaking every time a subway ran through because the muse beckoned the voice at rush hour this morning, O muse! Those sections were clipped out. I've been at my computer working on this recording for 12 hours I guess. May be too close to it to 'hear' it?

It's layered, of course, multiplicities seem what I like to do. You can read the words here if you like (though it looks more like a play of approaches and voices than a poem proper).

Spent days looking for music, too. I already had a small collection of 'possibilites' that I had collected through the year. Nothing was quite right. So I went searching at Jamendo. I found two tracks that each offered something substantial, and did something I had hoped never to have to do - I mixed them! Oh! I should give up these poetry performance pieces, or learn an instrument!

The tracks are a combination of that brilliant musician of experimental, midi, ruby texts that become sonic masterpieces, Alphacore's (Gabriel Garrod) side_project in his album Side Projects, and a new musician for me at Jamendo, Extra (Michael Erickson), and the beautiful track, The Quickest Vessel to a Distant Future, is from his album, Water Every Full Moon.

Three Mugshots:
            

Should I ever show the workings of my 'mad' mind? Ok, ok. I'm self-taught. From these mugshots you can get some idea why my poetry recordings take so long! Files get recorded and taken from here to there, and then there to here, and back again. Can you hear all those tracks in the final version? Who knows. But, like wearing beautiful lingerie, I know they're there.

Though with this last project - an album of poetry readings with the music of Jamendo musicians - has taken nearly a year, and with 11 tracks, it's only 33 minutes long!!

I may give up poetry recordings, and lingerie too.



mixed media on canvas

From Ocean Words

Where the poem began...


                                          

I don't expect anyone to actually like this, but it should read interestingly. My last cut on my upcoming poetry album. In process, still to be finished, recorded, and so on.

[When I write, I am a wreck. Wonder if this long piece written thru interspersed months will pull together? I read aloud; crawl into a ball; write with my shaking bones.]

Ink Ocean


In the burning ocean. Where plumes drag through the world's gloom. Swoop of feathers, 

tarred. Or metal wings of dispersants. Gloss the rocks. You can't know where we go at 

night. Or why the morning shines. Or the glimmer of gold before sunset. Relentless tidal 

cycles. Let me tear at the crests and troughs. Go in. GO IN. Shiver. Sin. Dark water, grey 

clouds. A rain of black in falls from the sky. Drips. Rips, slashes the wet heaving page. 

Heat of sandpaper on fire. Burn the slick, salt water on fire. Coral crevices to hide. 

Grottos like vowels. That invite. Come in, why don't you. Open. Open. Open. Arms 

reach up. Seeds rain down. Wash the foam. Pray forests. Burning despair of illusion. 

Fruit of veils to burn in. Salt washes open eyes. Deltas fog. They said GO IN.
.

In the night, I covered the words. Ink sheets. Sheets of the net of ink. Even I couldn't 

read them anymore. I forgot the words, or they forgot me. Or I had to make them up 

when you asked. They washed up from the black ocean, those words. Spun out of black 

thread with black foam on a wave darkly. Ocean of words lapping on the beach,
reckoning.
.

Love isn't a silky bliss mist, more like the suture we sew our wounds with. The bloodied 

scapula-feathers of angels.
.

Language summons us to speak.

Speaking cascades from depths
like wells of water overflowing.

Water eats away at order, rivers
erode their banks, deltas silt.

Our words silt in the paddies
of time, flooded with being.
.

...the ocean
tempests, salt
waves seep
from the rug
under my feet...
.
This strange sea birdsong on love.
.
Coded words. Words that conceal what they reveal, that hide their message in plain sight. 

Invisible essence of the world. We are seeing what is invisible. The falling butterflies. 

Our hands full of snow. Or white feathers in the heat. What do we hide behind? What 

can we not forget? The way we perceive the lives we live are our realities.
Don't make it up.

When I lift the lip, water drops of me, my desk, the paper.

                                    The salt burns.
.

We could be stars burning through the night
     or phosphorescent fish glowing without starlight in the deep.

I am a fisherman of words, dragging my nets through your oceans, trawling your schools 
of lexicons.
.

Love is the twine that binds our bones together.

Let the cold water fill our eyes until we swim in vision every night.

Oil swirls, coating.
.

Under sheets of sea in the frozen Atlantic we found each other.

     You came in me like a wave of love.

          My heart dances crill.

Whalesong of life.

     Salt falls from feathers under this pen writing its words on the dark side of the moon 
in the abandoned ocean beds.


Wet, heaving page.

     Ink sheets.


Love is an aorta. A pounding surf of consonants like blood cells in the syrum falling from
rising wings.


It's a clash of shell, bone, hunger, physics, troughs and crests, blinding moments, the 
sight of psychics.


     Into. The explosion of who we are.
               Our oily words. Crashing waters.
          Choking the river streams. Fish bulging, dying.
     We eat the world.

We go out each night and net the catch. Clean up the mess. Retain memories. Under
our gold skin, arms flap like wings of waves.
.

Let me flow over you while you drown me.

     ...in your love. in your love. in your love...
.


The dream of us opens.

I fold the ocean over my head. Spy on our dreams. Within dreams we liquify. We are gone 

at night. Wings of sand on fire. The lovers' grotto, held together with crab claws, filament 

of gold feather shafts. Gilded ink. Love wakes
you every day. Into
your
   body, body
      of words. 

Seeping, lines of tar on the sands. 
Crumple the paper of wind.


Find darkness; bring it in. IN.


          An opencast poem, working from the exposed surface.

          Taking images from what appears.
.

we anchor in the swells.

we are sky, sun, moon, stars, wet kisses of wind, sailing birds, flying fish, glittering ocean


                    we are nothing


we will wash away
drops in the ocean
without memory

nets of words
dissolving

 knowing 
this strange song of 
love loves
through us...

love loves
through us...

love loves
through us...
 

                                          

Here is the recording I will include in my upcoming album, 'Starfire, a collection of love poems,' which I'll release on Jamendo when it's finished:


direct link to Veils to Clothe Venus with music (2:33min)

Buz Hendricks created an original track for the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems. I have used a section of the ethereal, jazz-influenced, sensual track he sent me for this particular poem. You can hear the whole piece with poem and music (his mix) at Jamendo.

Veils to Clothe Venus is the 10th track in the album of poetry performance recordings I am working on. Music from a Jamendo musician accompanies each of the readings in the album. While I still have to write the poem for the last track, and the muse can be quirky, I am hoping to have the album available for listening and free download on Jamendo within a few weeks.

In the process of creating a listenable track, I recorded the little poem maybe a dozen times. Since I liked the reading alone and with Buz's music, I offer a shortened voice-only version of the same reading above. The simple, plain, unadorned voice:


direct link to voice-only version of Veils to Clothe Venus (1:48min)


Veils to clothe Botticelli's Venus

A poem arises catching the energy, imparting meaning, hesitant, faltering for words, images, rhythms.

My love for you.

Slowly, through endless revisions,
shaping this love.

Disparate layers emerge, an undercurrent infiltered with strands, approaches, understandings, memories, hopes, desires,
the way the sensual mind composes.

We create ourselves through each other. It's more complete,
who I am with you.

Not a version of reality but a veil of being,
the poem of love that is
a transparent garment we clothe ourselves with,
our metaphors and concepts of a world

which resists
our gaze.

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

From Women In Summer - the process of painting

                                          

'A Half Circle of Years': Emily Dickinson's poetry read by a group of poets collected by Dave Bonta in a Woodrat podcast for her 180th birthday. A wonderful collection, inspiring, fun.

Free through iTunes podcasts -look for Woodrat Podcast. It's on my iPod, and can be on yours too!


                                          

Veils To Clothe Botticelli's Venus by Brenda Clews


Music by Buz Hendricks: Somewhere Off Jazz Street.
Buz created beautiful ethereal, jazz-influenced, sensual music for a poem I composed out of my Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems. The original track is at Jamendo. I reworked a portion of that track of music with a new reading of the central poem of the Suite tonight:

Veils to clothe Botticelli's Venus

A poem arises catching the energy, imparting meaning, hesitant, faltering for words, images, rhythms.

My love for you.

Slowly, through endless revisions,
shaping this love.

Disparate layers emerge, an undercurrent infiltered with strands, approaches, understandings, memories, hopes, desires,
the way the sensual mind composes.

We create ourselves through each other. It's more complete,
who I am with you.

Not a version of reality but a veil of being,
the poem of love that is
a transparent garment we clothe ourselves with,
our metaphors and concepts of a world

which resists
our gaze.

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

From Women In Summer - the process of painting

                                          

direct link

Emily Dickinson Wild Nights, read by Brenda Clews.

A contribution to Dave Bonta's podcast of a collection of readings of Emily Dickinson's poetry on Dec 10, 2010, her 180th birthday (which I'll embed in the next post when it's available.)


WILD nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds  
To a heart in port,—
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!  
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!





                                          

direct link

My beautiful daughter shot some video from which I took these photos. Then after she said, 'No, your hair's not that red.' I do colour it - a light ash brown. In the bathroom mirror it doesn't look red. Who knows what I look like? I have no idea, not being able to see myself most of the time. The very last photo I adore.

From Photo Shoot

                                          

My beautiful daughter took this photo this afternoon. She is so sweet!