“Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” Pauline Oliveros

Tom Service’s profile of Oliveros was published in 2012 and is a superb introduction to her music. He cautioned that the deep listening concept is nothing about soft-focused meditation. “Her deep listening encompasses the whole world, it doesn’t separate you from it; the noise of politics, identity and representation is part of what she hears.” One of her works, a 1971 “sonic meditation” called Native, contains the instruction: “Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”

check out eliot fisk’s pink moccasins as he plays his transposed versions of bach’s cello suites on guitar, on a curious ‘proto-stage’… positioned and slightly elevated in an ‘extra-stage’ space, where his feet have a possibility of existence to become ears.

and then, fisk and paco pena playing flamenco together in a deliberately ‘unstaged’ setting:

and once again thanks to amy goodman, we get a complex view of castro:

and if there is a virtuosic difference between fisk’s transposed, classical bach and oliveros’s own accordion proving grounds, and there is a difference, it’s not a matter of virtuosity.

as for fleming, she speaks for herself, with serious wit, as the best artists do. art is knowledge, after all.

Linda Fleming

see above: Experimenta de Vacuo Spatio