A subscriber post on Substack: three fragments from Daybook, on Mal Waldron/Jeanne Lee (with excursions through Shepp, Coltrane, and Gilroy), Jacques Derrida/Ornette Coleman, and Anti-Fascist Noise.
For Jeanne Lee, words and music were themselves always in
dialogue, communication traversing the endless path of the semantic and
non-semantic, the spoke and the unspoken. Talking drums, speaking
tongues, healing water healing earth hurling air and fire.
Lee’s first husband was the sound poet David Hazelton: in the mid-60s,
they lived in Berkeley, Lee acting as editorial consultant on Hazelton’s
magazine Synapse and performing in sound poetry
events. After the couple’s split, and Hazelton’s suicide in 1968, poetry
continued to be an integral part of work as she stretched away from the
form of the standard or the song, improvising off lines of poetry—her
own, those of Hazelton or Jackson MacLow or juggler, clown, poet Robert Lax—or, more frequently, going beyond words altogether. (“no words, only a feeling”, begins her record Conspiracy,
working off a text by Hazelton.) “The thing about lyrics is that I
stopped singing them because they no longer represented a reality I
could relate to”, she remarks in an interview with Roger Riggins for Coda
magazine. “the word becomes incidental to the sound […] But now I’ve
come back to them in a totally different way, from the inside out.” For
Lee, words and music mutually unsettled and mutually transformed each
other. One of Lee’s former students remarks
on her emphasis in teaching on “the musicality of words, the dancing
and the movement of words, the unity of words, music and dance.” To
Riggins, she speaks about “singing in a way so as not to be conscious of
“singing” but just becoming a white light”.
I
began to understand that this was another dimension. I began to write
poetry again and to understand that the poem could be another reality.
Very pleased to announce the publication of Abstractive, a new collaboration between myself and Candace Hill Montgomery, begun in Sag Harbor in 2024 and just published by Further Other Book Works. It’s been an honour to collaborate and many thanks are due also to publishers CJ Martin and Julia Drescher. Please see the publisher’s announcement below for more details.
Candace Hill Montgomery & David Grundy
Abstractive
ISBN: 9780998460703 142 pages Full Color Paperback $34.95 April 2026
“For Russell Atkins, the ‘psychovisualist’ composes structured relationships that can be viscerally felt by the mind’s eye. In Abstractive, readers learn to lean on the way those structures snare hidden connections: between visual and language arts, music and emotion, and everyone out there searching for the ancient heavenly connection. We are on the cusp.”—Craig Dworkin, author of Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality
“Here is vivacious visual and textual collaboration where melodic lines act as a counterpoint of philosophic riffing so that signification is expansively flung open delivering vantage points galore, tantalizing consciousness. ‘Form sets off everywhere’. We are treated to a cacophony in words accompanied by intense, colorful images. Candace Hill Montgomery and David Grundy conjure the living legacy of Russell Atkins and the results are exquisite!”—Brenda Iijima, author of Presence
“Candace Hill Montgomery and David Grundy set off a collaborative sensory sweep via these polyphonic and polyrhythmic poems, ‘ensorcellating’ an expansive tonality playing within and around image and word. These poems seek a mental music that ‘avoids fitting into the chord,’ ‘innuendoewing’ around the breakage of each eroding word. We are borne through the revelation of a doubled ‘mind in flight’: poetry as ongoing, unceasing dialogic process. Following Candance Hill Montgomery’s incredible long poem, Short Leash Kept On (Materials 2022), this is a thrilling and essential work.”—Geoffrey Olsen, author of Nerves Between Song
About the Authors:
The work of Candace Hill Montgomery spans painting, photography, installation, assemblage, textiles and writing. Making and exhibiting since the 1970s, Hill Montgomery was born in 1945 in Queens, New York, and now lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York. In 2024, she presented a solo exhibition, Pretty Birds Peer Speak Sow Peculiar, at Blank Forms, New York. Recent group exhibitions include From the Studio: Fifty-Eight Years of Artists in Residence, Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, 2025); Here Is a Gale Warning: Art, Crisis & Survival, Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge, 2025) and Reluctant Gravities, Hollybush Gardens (London, 2024). Her latest publications include the collection Muss Sill (Distance No Object, 2020) and Short Leash Kept On (Materials, 2022), a long poem inspired by detective fiction and the writing of Lloyd Addison and Russell Atkins. In 2023, a major essay on her work, “Candace Hill-Montgomery, Against Containment” by Amy Tobin, was published in Art History, Volume 46. She is represented by Hollybush Gardens in London and will present her first solo exhibition with the gallery in June 2026.
David Grundy is a poet and scholar. He is the author of the critical books A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and San Francisco, 1944–Present (Oxford University Press, 2024); A True Account (The 87 Press, 2023), a book of poetry; and Present Continuous (Pamenar Press, 2022), a book of lyric essays; and co-editor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). He runs the small press Materials.
In 2003, mass anti-war protests against the choreographed build-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq. The protests politicised a whole generation of us.
Twenty-three years later, the US and Israel launch another illegal war off the bat, with no pretence at UN presentations, consultations, weapons inspections, by a president at once pursuing a Nobel peace prize and illegally invading multiple other countries with the only justification being that this is what he wants to do. Just because he can. A “pre-emptive strike” when there is no sign of any impending attack is not a pre-emptive strike at all. The phantom idea of Iranian nuclear weapons which don’t exist, from a nation that seems intent to blow up the entire nation, the entire region, the entire world. But isn’t that what this entity, this holding corporation we call America has always done, Democrat or Republican alike? The Democrats just use a bit more window-dressing, a bit more “due process”: vacillate, qualify their condemnation, tacitly agree.
The term “regime” is used exclusively in western media to describe that of the late Khamenei, killed in a strike, but perhaps people might reflect, it should be used on the world’s richest nation, the world’s most feral, venal, viral empire, one of the most internally unequal countries in the world, a country that illegally invades others, just because it can.
Their justifications shift day by day. Pre-empted by Israel, to pre-empt Israel, to destroy nuclear capability, to enact regime change, to destroy the army and the navy, to liberate the people, to protect American interests: just because they can. Military commanders declare a crusade, the US President “anointed by God” to bring about Armageddon. I’m not making this up. The Secretary of Defense and his Crusader tattoos.
And so what it comes down to is this: At least one hundred children die in a bombing of a girl’s school in Minab. To linger with the horror of it. The numbers rise each day and they are replaced in the newspapers by columns on the deaths of three US soldiers and disruption to the flight paths of western travellers. As if one life were worth a hundred. As if anything could ever justify this.
We’ve seen it all happen before. This has been daily life in Gaza for three years now, and we’ve seen it all happen before. We were there on the streets or in front of our screens during the Iraq War in 2003 and we watched the bombs fall on TV like fireworks, we sat and we watched it all and sometimes we spoke and we shouted and wrote poems or essays and the carnage went on, and we’ve seen it all happen before.
As if this attack will save lives, as if it will not kill many, many more to add to the thousands already killed on the streets in Iran in protest for the last three months, the millions killed by the US and its proxies across the world for the last three centuries. As if one can declare war on an entire country just to boost one’s approval ratings before the mid-terms. As if one has the right to dictate the way the world works, and we’ve seen it all happen before.
As if the trail of carnage, destroyed lands, destroyed lives that is our present reality will prove anything different.
And that is the way the world works, they will say, because they make it.
And we’ve seen it all happen before.
On the video the smoke rising in Tehran and the birds fly in front of the camera away. Where they go to, where they’re flying: some place, perhaps, where people might hide or fly or flee, some dream of that; that flight, that movement, from bombs in the sky to border regimes and death in the ocean, that incessant movement, that structures this world, its blocs of power, its people in the cracks, the possibility for people’s war diminishing as the people are massacred, by whoever, regimes internal or external; to have to believe in the movement of the people nonetheless, whatever that might mean; to believe, at the very least, that people wish to survive and that there are others in the world who wish them to survive too, who don’t wish death on their heads, bombs in the sky, extraction and crusade and a customary sadism, experienced in “outraged futility” as we protest or we scream, or experienced in customary banality and swiped away from onscreen—the tremulous, held-in banality of this evil that burns the world in its wake.
And now we are politicized, and then we were politicized, and now we know it all, or some of it, and then we could see it coming, and now we are bamboozled, and we are taken by surprise, and in 2003 that movement of hundreds of thousands of the street stopped nothing, whatever our will, and yet to keep trying, to owe the dead at least that, and for the living, too, to owe them that, though here as the first spring flowers poke from the earth and the birds outside begin in profuse strains their song, death from the skies is the only skylark’s flight poetry can see.
“When weapons come from the US, do they strike us more gently than when they come from the regime’s killing machines?”
A subscriber post on Substack on a solo guitar (and saxophone) set by Dirar Kalash, with diversions on Paul Klee, Christa Wolf, mathematics, awkwardness, blues, and cheerfulness as ways to utopia.
Before he plays, Kalash speaks about the idea that politics,
revolution, resistance is not ideology, or not just ideology, but
something that is forced from one when one can no longer breathe, as
Fanon says of anti-colonial revolt. Air through the lungs, rising up.
The piece at once literalizes all that and turns it into representation:
the deaths of racialized people in custody, in jail or on the street;
DK speaks the words “I can’t breathe” into the saxophone before squalls
of notes translate it or transcend or move through it, breath becomes
sound becomes something else—not, he says, as a process of abstraction,
or of abstraction as the removal of context, content, but abstraction as
politics; or abstraction as the constant oscillation of the literal and
the metaphorical, the capacity for translation in sound and speech of
what it’s possible at a given moment to say amidst all the choking air.
Sound becomes something else, and that something else is not easy, it’s not nice,
it’s messy or unpleasant, it’s what we’d rather gloss over, its sticky
entanglements. Breath and the breathing apparatus, a trail of saliva
from the saxophone, a trial, the phlegmy mucus matter of the lungs one
coughs up, a habitual gargling or strangling vocabulary of vocalities, a
matter of course. “Base materialism”
and so on. Is how the spirit chokes to get out, is labour, bodily
production, without which any notion of spirit and its entanglement with
matter is just an empty mystical shell.
Mid-December 2004. The Museum of Garden History, Lambeth. AMM—Eddie Prévost on percussion and John Tilbury on piano—perform with Sachiko M on empty sampler, a performance a little over an hour long, unearthed from Tilbury’s archive and released in 2025 as Testing. (The album is available from the Matchless Recordings website here.) We begin with a duet for sine wave and the rumble of muffled traffic familiar around old buildings in London, the stone and the earth vibrating with vehicles unknown when they were built. Collisions of time.
Today as I put the CD on, I have floaters in my eyes, and trying to focus them sideways on a point in the distance as you’re meant to, things start to blur and swim in the middle in the field of vision. The start of the music something like that, too. It’s several minutes before we hear a tone from the piano, the overtonal ping of a note with the string dampened by finger or object. Bending, pressing and holding the piano’s inner strings, varieties of pressure and weight can lead to the subtlest shards of resonance intended and unintended. Tilbury has been working this area for decades and each note is inflected with the history of that practice: a practice of instantaneous carefulness, patience and intense listening. Prévost’s cymbals and tam-tam are invariably bowed: percussion reinvented as bowing rather than striking, a sound sustained by an incessant movement of the arms, but not a traditionally rhythmic one. Percussion becomes a stringed instrument and the piano a kind of muffled, tuned percussion played quietly and slowly. Machines are turned against themselves, identities swap and blur.
A sudden and exquisite arpeggiated chord. Broken and rolled, the piano as harp. The snows started to melt yesterday and the temperature today leapt up by around ten degrees. The world outside the window, muffled for a month in the snow, suddenly comes to life again, and sounds from outside mingle with the performance, so I can’t tell if the birds or church bells I’m hearing are coming from the recording or from the newly-brightened daytime outside. There’s a particular quality of hush to this recording, as if the implacable harshness of Sachiko M’s test tones, buoyed on the feather down of bowed or struck piano string and metal were a kind of austere cocoon, a drained lullaby suffused with a mourning attentiveness. The scrape of percussion is like a rusted gate, a door, the piano’s ping a gentle tap. Gaining admission, quietly exiting. At one point a police siren; at another, the choked utterance of what sounds like a sampled voice; at another, a sound as if someone were quietly whistling to the side. Seymour Wright’s liner notes link the music to plant growth, to the plant cultivation in the museum’s history, to dissociative fugue states, where one temporarily loses all sense of who one is or where one is. (As Alessandro Giustiano puts it, Sachiko’s sounds (for the most part) involve “no attack, do not offer mediation or guidance.”) And yet both Sachiko M and AMM have never sounded more like themselves, a practice of identity as dissolution.
Prévost plays a “stringed barrel drum”, a wine barrel he took from an old Italian restaurant on the Strand where AMM used to eat and repurposed into an instrument. With its added strings, it sounds somewhere between a guitar, a koto, and a lute; the upper end of a string bass, and the sound one gets from stringing rubber bands over a box to make a child’s guitar; a delicacy chunky and crude, answered by Sachiko M’s electronic rumble, crackle. Music as salvage: the empty sampler, the empty barrel, the piano, its interior treated, as per Annea Lockwood burning or flowering pianos, as a source of endlessly modified growth, of resonators and resonating devices, string and hammer and key, a finger or an object added and taking away. At once clear and always blurring the edges, the music seeps in like the cold Wright describes on that night, seeping in from the Thames and its tides, sweeping in from the outside, bleeding into skin and stone. Like plants, musicians, too, have to weather the winter: often in freezing venues, wherever can be rented or found, to prepare, to test, to take and transform the place they’re in in the gentlest of ebbs and flows, of incremental growths, of giving and taking.
Stuart Broomer in his review talks of the music’s opening as “a study in the ineffable”. But this is also a study in the palpable. It is about presence, however stretched or suspended. Sounds that die and are succeeded by others. AMM’s second album was, after all, called The Crypt, and in their repurposed industrial sounds they perhaps refract something of the musician’s pasts, already haunted: the echoic clang of the factory, the sounds of metal striking, sparks flying, ships hauling into docks where Prévost’s grandfather worked, the post-war damage in London and other cities. In 2015, AMM performed at the Museu Industrial de Bala do Tejo in Portugal, a performance later released as Indústria. And as AMM’s music continued through the 1980s and out the other side, those characteristic sounds, their boom and swell and crackle, had come to speak all the more of the post-industrial wastelands left in Thatcher’s wake. (On the other side of the ocean, Detroit techno: both creative responses to ongoing conditions of production.) The histories, like those of the Museum of Garden History and other spaces in which AMM have performed, could be traced back even further. You might even go as far back as Prévost’s Huguenot ancestors, fleeing persecution in France. The Huguenot exodus gave the English language its word ‘refugee’, from the French réfugié ‘gone in search of refuge’: the kind of history all too easily forgotten in the current anti-migrant hostility seeded in Britain and across Europe.
The music is not “about” any of these things. Yet they surround it, are the world in which it moves. Presence stretched, suspended; sounds die and are succeeded by others. Yet in that moment of sustain—piano pedal, sampler’s infinite spread, the way a bow stroke maintains a static sound, paradoxically, through movement—and in their recorded after-life, they are never more alive.
Charles Mingus recorded this version of Martin Niemöller’s anti-fascist warning in 1965.
And today, sixty years later in Minneapolis when people intervene to help their neighbours, to come to the aid of those in their community, to attempt to ensure due legal process, they are pushed to the ground by the agents of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and shot ten times, shot four times, shot in the body on the ground, shot in the head, when pulling away in a car. Alex Pretti. Renée Good. A nurse, a poet. The observer is the new target. To be a witness a fatal act.
The Associated Press detailed that Pretti had embraced a person who had just been shoved by an agent. An agent then shoved Pretti, and the two fell back, still embracing.
They shoot down good and they shoot people embracing.
Sharing footage of death has been a necessary way of contending with the lies the administration tells in public. Evidence, reproduction, to show that this happened, even as the state doctors the photos and footage it itself releases. The image, when our eyes can’t be trusted, and the word: the lies told about the image. “I didn’t say that”. “He didn’t say that”. The image and the word. The reproduction of the image becomes a weapon, and, as a weapon, its consequences are fatal: loops of death. The line between witnessing and horrified voyeurism that for the past years of live-streamed genocide has become a part of the texture of observation. What does this do to solidarity and how we conceive of it.
Beyond these ethical questions, questions of representation, questions that matter for our conscience and our consciousness as artists, yet in ways that we find sometimes impossible to track, what matters is what you do. In Minneapolis, protests, marches, a general strike. The resistance of communities to the violence perpetrated on them, in their name.
Mingus’ recitation plays over footage from a demonstration shot for Thomas Reichman’s 1968 film Mingus. His biographer, Gene Santoro, writes:
Mingus figured you had to stand for something. The powers that be would come for you anyway. He was busted a few times with other marchers and spent time in the Tombs, New York’s downtown holding tank.
Mingus also shows Mingus facing eviction from his loft at 5, Great Jones Street, where he’d hoped to set up a music school, in 1966, and from which he was evicted after a crooked landlord set him up for a fall. The film’s last scene shows the press and cops crowding round as his instruments, his scores, his life are taken out of the building, and he’s taken to the police station after they find needles and a rifle in his belongings. He was released: no shots were fired; he planned music for a ballet called ‘My Arrest’.
Charles Mingus, a well-known jazz musician, was arrested with two other persons late last night in a demonstration by a group of 200 hippies outside the Charles Street police station in Greenwich Village. Mr. Mingus, who was accused of scuffling with a civilian and two policemen who attempted to intervene, was charged with three counts of felonious assault. The demonstration began with a march by the hippies from Washington Square Park to the Charles Street station. It was touched off by rumors that an itinerant musician had been arrested earlier. These were later said to be unfounded. At the station the hippies sat down and began singing. The police moved the group half a block to the corner of Greenwich Avenue, where, they said, Mr. Mingus engaged in a scuffle with a motorist who had objected to hippies sitting on his car.
Mingus recorded ‘Don’t Let it Happen Here’ in March 1965, introduced by Ralph Ellison for a TV performance, and again in December, in the version released on Music Written For Monterey 1965. Not Heard... Played In Its Entirety At UCLA Vols. 1 & 2. That same year, sixty years ago, the assassinations of James Meredith, Malcolm X. Mingus fires his rifle into the ceiling and notes that it’s the same kind of gun that killed JFK. The right wing and liberal state alike claim a monopoly on violence, at home and abroad, and the vigilante forces that operate outside it, but with its tacit approval. In March 1965, FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe murdered the Civil Rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo, shooting at her car as she ferried from the march on Selma. It was rumoured he’d assembled bombs for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Liuzzo grew up in one-room shacks with running water: her activism was the result of experience, of solidarity, the opposite of the KKK’s violence, as today, citizens turn up for their neighbours while others cheer on the forces of hatred. Gary Thomas Rowe received immunity.
The state assassinates people in private, and its agents murder people in public, on the highways and on the streets, whether they are activists or not. Fred Hampton. Sandra Bland. The state becomes and remains fascist because it assassinates and decimates the opposition. But this process of becoming is not some sudden leap of the cliff, though it can feel that way. The state becomes and remains fascist because the potentials for fascism are already there. In his book Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano looks at the analyses of police violence against populations of colour in the writing of Angela Davis and George Jackson to argue that fascism is a differentially-distributed experience. For some, the experience of the state is that it is already fascist. And then it spreads. The tree rotten from the inside will eventually collapse and take down everyone who’s placed their trust in it.
In Reichman’s film, Mingus delivers a sardonic monologue, tinged with furious irony and ironic fury.
I pledge allegiance to your flag—not that I want to, but for the hell of it, I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, the white flag, with no stripes, no stars. It is a prestige badge worn by a profitable minority.
“If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night”, James Baldwin wrote to Angela Davis a few years later.
The movement of the people in the streets can be clamped down on, it can be diverted, dispersed, thousands dead, arrested. The empire hovers over the regime, at home and abroad. The empires, plural, their vassals, their dregs. In Venezuela, in Iran. Invasion, kidnapping or ‘deals’ in exchange for extraction, of oil, of wealth: gangster capitalism, the continuation of decades of imperialism by all and any means, already dividing up the land piled up with rubble and with the dead. Fifty per cent of profits from new mineral and oil projects in Ukraine will go to the US; under the aegis of the US-led “board of peace”, the UAE plans a collaborative open-air prison marketed as a ‘safe zone’ in Gaza; the British government denies its complicity in the genocide in Sudan. But the movement doesn’t stop.
Mingus’ delivery in the TV performance is halting, as he fumbles the number of people genocided—death exceeding the weight of statistics—and over the collective noun to use—the politics of solidarity—speaking out against “those who killed…the other people with me.” And in that very awkwardness lies its clarity, its power. “And I say the only way we can avoid this is to look and speak out now. And don’t…let…it happen here”. From an opening lament spread between the brass instruments in the band as he recites Niemöller’s text, Mingus strikes up a propulsive piano figure and the band blares into collective improvisation. On the march, on the move. Fluency in fracture and the stammered statement of fact. The movement doesn’t stop. And though they may breathe in breaths strained, asphyxiated, observed, occupied, a breath that comes in gasps, a breath in combat, the people—continue to breathe.
ake’s
biography describes her as “a surrogate weeper, currently working and
living in Beijing, conducting site and context specific sound
experiments, events, behaviors and installations, also writing poetry,
being a musician, organizer and waiter”. Among other activities, ake
“accidentally initiated the nomadic space A2 space”, and appears as part
of collaborative projects on Zhu Wenbo’s Beijing-based cassette label Zoomin’ Night, as well as Yan Jun’s sub jam cassette box Silence is Shit, but ake (阿科), released in January 2025 as Sub jam 020, is her first solo album.
Working with the material to hand, ake’s work gives a new, subversive meaning to the well-worn term “site-specific”.The
eight tracks fit together awkwardly, like a kind of broken jigsaw. They
refuse to build up to a unity, but remain fragments, though, as
fragments, they are in themselves whole: broken wholes, wholly broken. A
majority of the tracks are field recordings, though this is no
pastoral. If it has a ‘field’, it is the field of the (urban) social:
social action and social inaction as experienced in the corners of
everyday life, the boredoms and discontents and acts of quiet rebellion
by which one might negotiate one’s way through the world and its
systems, what is given to us, what is taken away from us. These are
recordings of environments, or recordings that make environments, that
intervene in them, that frame and re-frame them, that question or that
spark questions. Workers destroying a wall in a Shenzen hotel are heard
from a bed, the hammer blows a kind of impromptu drum set, accompanied
by scattered fragments of conversation [...] How do we listen to this album? A field recording is supposed to
put emphasis on the environment, but these recordings often feel
‘inwards’ as much ‘outward’. It sometimes feels as if the listening is
being done as much by the performer as the listener, eavesdropping,
confused.
