Listen with the camera you fool!

Listen with an eye to nature;

listen with an ear to silence;

listen with the mind to endless absurdities;

reach out to one,

snatch it from the flowing river,

and throw its wet carcass

onto the pavement;

listen with someone;

listen alone if you can stand it;

cry while listening;

listen while crying;

listen while death is a salesman 

rapping on your neighbor’s door;

it's always the same sounds,

all the same noise;

it's never the same anything;

listen while you can—

soon you’ll be listening to

whistling rubble.

~

Whistling Rubble was originally composed to accompany a hanging sculpture with a working title Visions of a Toxic Wasteland– though all of the composing transpired before the sculpture had ever been available to view, and the sculpture is now a short film called Crude Eye. Thus Whistling Rubble (somewhat appropriately) drew inspiration from a sculpture that does not exist; nonetheless, it carries sentiments similar to those of the artwork that now does exist. Both this piece and that artwork take as their point of departure the image of a toxic wasteland– in the case of Crude Eye, this is a semi-imaginary oil refinery metropolis colored by the fanciful inflections of speculative memory; whereas Whistling Rubble envisions a wasteland far less productive and a little more toxic, as might manifest in a decaying post-human world. The clarinet intones a somber tune as might a gust of wind caressing some hollow crumbling remnant of human construction, flowing and whistling over dead manmade crags and running in its course over hills of forgotten rot and wreckage. In this respect, one may interpret Whistling Rubble as a sonic contour of a toxic wasteland traced by the wind and translated by the clarinet, or one may not interpret it in this way. Finally, one could argue that Crude Eye and Whistling Rubble also share similar intents– perhaps both seek, as does the eponymous poem above, to warn against taking for granted our very prized human existence which nevertheless continues to fight against its own longevity– or one could argue something entirely to the contrary.