Don't worry, I'll play it by ear

First, she became ear, then played it. Keep your mouth shut tight. That’s right. I’m sorry, but there have got to be some conditions. For to truly listen, is an act of submission, conducted intentionally. Surrendered, released of reason, representation, reality, really any word starting with r. The demarcation line of fiction. Penetration can’t be evaded I guess, but you invert it. Circlusion — that’s what Bini Adamczak calls the process of engaged absorption. An ear is a hole for a reason after all. A finger taught me how to listen. You were dancing and with your finger, drew an upward curve in the air, pointing to a sound aloft somewhere. A subtle trilling tone had set in, with which you resonated. Yeah, I know this track, but this gesture marked a previously inaccessible anchorage. It tethered me. You made me listen through a braided mirror. Me and your finger, in sonic camaraderie. Earphoria. Listening is not a solo gig. We have the sound and the ear. But the in-between is what we hear when we listen. Sound and receiver do not exist prior to their intra-action, are not predetermined entities, meeting. They are created by their encounter, as is the space, unfolding in the wiredness. Relation indeed has its own consciousness. Digital spirits whisper with the same algorithms that larynxes do. A desire rolls down the tongue into a crackle, rolls into a noise, rolls into a voice. The created code sneaks through a grid of transistors. A reconfiguring of the world when we realize we’re all apparatuses. They are, says Karen Barad, open-ended practices. Faced now with the impossibility of closure. No need to bill the messenger though. Unlocking layer after layer of imagination, meaning and memory, descending a lopsided ladder all the way to the cellar-level of human experience. The debris of past sounds in the room. Here you try to measure a sound particle. The least possible difference. You’ll find yourself a cheeky time-traveler. Our minds become glitchy metronomes once we start listening deeply. Rhythm becomes the medium of travel, and we the conductor of our own herstories. A voice takes the stage. Now, humming on our own terms, we march straight out of the white cube, whose score wasn’t written for us anyway. Relation, reconfiguration, rearticulations, reworkings – the r’s start returning. And by now you’ll hear them in your head. rrrr. Listening first, is resisting the pathways of reasoning notched into our body-brains. Extended humans. Extended by the excess of time, of volume, of minds. All the way ‘til a bird in the Australian forest sings a chainsaw’s song. The Australian lyrebird is the most accomplished singer in the feathered universe, and can imitate any sound. Even this one. You try and make a list of the century-long premises for how a bird’s tongue turned into a chainsaw turned into a song. The first and the last one is: she listened fucking well.