Get all 4 Hourloupe releases available on Bandcamp and save 30%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Opera of the War, Three Nights in the Wawayanda, Sleepwalker, and Future Deserts.
1. |
Feather Crossing Light
06:28
|
|
||
|
(It is wartime and a composer sits in a ruined theater. His music, like everything else, has been destroyed. Notes resist sequence and abandon harmony. They drift, deaf to one another, suspended in a sonic mobile. He gets an idea: to develop an opera out of these fragments, ashes and disarray. It must be made outside, in the streets. Bodies that live the war will live the music.)
After weeks of bombings and fire
The Opera reopened out-of-doors.
The silence in the hall
Was never really silence: moisture
Dripping into pools left by the firefighters counterpointed
The crash of mortars, a shingle of
Ceiling tin banging into itself, dangling
From a wire, wrenched away
To salvage electrical equipment and lights
For hospitals where the injured lay
Beneath turquoise sheets
As the power surged on,
Then faded, again and again
As if the building were struggling to climb a hill.
The composer sat for days in a red
Velvet chair, stuffing emanating
Between his legs, and stared at the stage
Less in despair and more entranced in the work
Taking shape in his head, a music of shards,
Quanta of sound, notes, but amnesiac kinds,
Quizzically alone, unable to recall where they had
Come from or to form any progressive
Relationships with those following next, notes in isolation.
He imagined dispatching them one by one on the staff,
Lone semaphores unaware of each other, calls
Without responses, voices not exactly singing
But speaking past each other in all the many cadences
And stresses of human body text as they poured
Out of him and halted in the air, suspended
In randomized proximities
Segments in a sound mobile stirred
By a child: what if I blow this way, what if I blow that?
Sometimes touching each other with only a glance
Sometimes t-boning like blind-folded drivers.
Slowly he conceived a new work, the opera to be held
Outside, in the plaza, studded by glass
From shattered brasseries, a dumpster orthogonal
To the decommissioned grand fountain. The Opera
Of the War in body texts it would be called, saying this aloud
To himself as he sat in the cratered theater and a hawk
Unsettled before settling again on a girder and a single feather
Detached and crossed beam-lighted air, in and out
Of blackness, glowing and fading, then falling somewhere.
|
||||
2. |
Teacup
04:13
|
|
||
|
(But the work is hard to realize. During the long spans of boredom war occasions, people seek other things: a sexual encounter in the stall of a fun fair that has shuttered. Nonetheless, a chorus appears; a collective is forming, though it cannot recognize itself as one.)
The firefighters’ fair came to town
Put up but never torn down
Never opened, rides stilled
And prize stalls dominions now
Of owls nests and spiders’ cribs
As on the square’s perimeters
Cherries fell
And trees reddened past August
Two soldiers met in the teacup–
The Ferris wheel’s bottom car–
And sat across from each other
Swiping their phones
Assault rifles across their hips
Occasionally looking up
And laughing. A faint buzzing
Stopped them every once in a while
And they cocked an ear
And scanned the sky
But no one was coming
And when no one was coming
And night had arrived
They rose and went off
To one of the darkened stalls
Where they pulled off their shirts
And their belt buckles clinked
And without stepping from their boots
One stood with his back to the wall
While the other knelt
And the floodlights of the plaza
Blinked on and the players
Entered the illuminated loop
In turquoise sheets
And simply began singing
In no coordinated way
And the song unfolded now
To the rhythm of the lovers
Who were not listening
Not to the drone
Nor the tympanis
Nor the horns
Nor the bass, bowing
Alone and off in the corner
|
||||
3. |
Jacob
02:29
|
|||
|
(Loss is everywhere and must be given a name. The name of Jacob evokes its myriad forms: memory, cold, isolation. Loss also manifests in physical forms; the torso, eggplant and violin are a family of shapes related by it.)
This mountain lake is called Jacob
For blue that is in his eye
Salt in his tears is called Jacob
For the smell of his friend
The camera in his head is called Jacob
For the dream that will never forget
The torso found among eggplants is Jacob
The house on the bend is called Jacob
For it is the sanctuary of none
Snow piling on the table is called Jacob
And the firenet trapping the owls
The violin, after playing for hours,
Took the shape of a man in three parts
His eyes were tuning pegs
Strings stretched the length of his thorax
Passing children pressed their fingers into his f-holes and laughed
And called him Jacob
He holds up his hand
A white disc hovers and spins
The song is called Jacob
|
||||
4. |
Luz
02:16
|
|
||
|
(Yet the composer persists. He will be a healer of sound. And he will do this by turning the bodies of those wounded in the war into instruments of music. He will mic survivors and compose the notes they generate into his opera. In this process, the soul re-asserts its presence. “Luz” refers to what some Jewish scholars assert is an indestructible bone that hosts the soul.)
The players dressed in sheets from the hospital. In the blue geodesic tent with stretchers and saline, each submitted to the short procedure of a subcutaneous mic lodged in a pocket of skin. The composer donned headphones and assigned a channel to each from his laptop then closed his eyes and lifted his hands to conduct a short piece he later called Luz after the Hebrew for a fragment of bone to which a small scrap of the soul stays attached.
|
||||
5. |
The Channels
04:58
|
|||
|
(Before music can be reborn, before the Opera of the War can truly be written, the bodies must reckon with history. In a gallery lit by an immolating docent, the images of history appear. It is a nightmare, a hell. But it also paves the way for a living embryonic mass of notes to come alive, for bodies to build themselves out of the past and out of nothing.)
Water laps the steps of the capitol
I am a habit taking form
A rhythm, a repetition, a norm
Black fungal spores when the waters retreat
Out nothingness my feet
My burning idea like a docent on fire
Runs in the gallery corridor
Lighting the walls, the air
Knobs of knees like pistons appear
I’m almost here, one pulse more
My torso my hips
Between which my penis is kissed
By the soldier who kneels
As the violin reel…drifts
My fingers pink shafts
My bellybutton flange
And the tiny brown aureoles
Around my nipples like microstorms
So I am conceived
By sound and each tone
Is a bone and attached to one is a scrap of a soul
The burning docent runs
The head of John the Baptist
Is held out like a lantern
His eyes bulge
A knob in my pants
I am a body of wants, asks
The fungus spreads along the capitol walls
The fungus is marble
Here from now on but maybe before
Jefferson’s child is sold at market
Sold to a slaver
The son of this constitution’s engraver
A body inscribed
Subject to force
I am a body tuned
I am the violin prodigy
In a plantation barracoon
I am a body hurtling faster
Arrows descend from the corners, all four
An eighth turn and an eighth turn more
And they are suspended and I advance
Straight onto the their tips and stare up, entranced
The docent panics
And at St. Sebastian
Burns and collapses
In a glowing heap
At the Venus de Milo’s feet
The docent smokes
The fungus creeps
The composer opens his eyes
And sees the living proscenium
The frieze of squirming lines
Of the opera in the streets
The bodies which are notes on a score
Spiraling inward, lashing out
Sounding into the future
Echoing before
Amnesiac, historicized, unsure
|
||||
6. |
Murmuration of the Bells
04:22
|
|||
|
(And then something extraordinary happens. Music reveals itself. An air-born orchestra of bells appears in the sky. The iron instruments — some of the oldest vessels of music, used to warn of time and fire and celebration — are alive, breathing. They demonstrate lessons of coordination, movement and their spiraling performance is music’s signature of joy. The composer doesn't give birth to music, he is born from it, given life — and that life is the Opera of the War.)
One by one the bells appeared in the sky
Hanging there as if they had been dropped and stalled
And the larger bell, the deep grey one,
Unimaginably heavy but still somehow floating
Advanced to the front
And the other bells smaller and trebly
Fell in behind it
The grey bell seemed to draw in a breath
And its sides swelled
And it propelled itself, slowly at first,
The other bells settling into formation
The bells became a murmuration
Looping, flattening, a single line
Until one flank tilted up and out
Banking and ringing as they passed over
Their movements pressed the air
Until it seemed to be squeezed out
And our eyes widened for first time in a long time
Then they released us if finished with us
And went on tracing themselves into the air
|
||||
Hourloupe
Hourloupe: “I associate it, by assonance, to ‘hurler’ (to roar), to ‘huleler’ (to hoot), to ‘loup’
(wolf).”
—Jean Dubuffet
Hourloupe is a collaboration between writer, musician, and artist Frank Menchaca and Anar Badalov.
... more
If you like Hourloupe, you may also like:
supported by 7 fans who also own “Opera of the War”
go to album
The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volumes 1 and 2
by the Mountain Goats
supported by 4 fans who also own “Opera of the War”
This song is an anthem for me. I will survive out of spite to those that don't want me to.
go to album
Amselysen pulls at the edges of pop and club music, taffy-like, to create these sugary, warped, fascinating experimental confections.
go to album
Longer Form Cat Calls
by jobfit
The latest EP from jobfit explores the intersection of electronic music and spoken word, setting vivid writing over crackling beats.
go to album
Moody and weird experimental pop from Melbourne follows the intuitive logic of the surrealist game from which the group takes their name.
go to album
Songs for Pierre Chuvin
by the Mountain Goats
supported by 4 fans who also own “Opera of the War”
Any given album from the Mountain Goats is a genuinely unique experience and this is certainly no exception. :)
go to album
