Funeral Music

I was at a party on Saturday night when someone came in and said that a van had driven into the Berlin Christopher Street Day parade, killed one person, injuring more. I’ve never been to CSD; go, instead, to the Internationalist Queer Pride demo that, since 2021, has been organised in contradistinction to the corporatisation and pinkwashing of the main CSD demo, whose organisers had called the police to remove pro-Palestinian marchers. Since 2023, this has meant outspoken support for the victims of the genocide in Gaza, and all the attendant policing that involves. So to me Berlin Pride also means cops pepper-spraying and pain-gripping people on the street. Well, it’s in the tradition. In the sun, the heatwave having finally come back after the week’s rain and thunderstorms, finally setting off after several hours, marching past the newly-converted Rheinmetall weapons factory, formerly a builder of car parts, the first time arms manufacture has taken place in Berlin since the Second World War; Rheinmetall, sender of weapons to Israel, to Turkey, to Saudi Arabia, for use in Syria, in Gaza, in Yemen, part of the government’s shift towards increased weapons production since Olaf Scholz’s 2022 Zeitenwende speech and its 100 billion euro fund for war, the willed and ever-expanding horizon of war. The march monitored, not for our own safety, but for the safety of the city’s “white” citizens, by vanloads of armed cops with their machine guns pointing down to the ground; the same cops who let another van drive through or past the protective barriers in the Tiergarten to plough into a path of queers that evening. Not protecting us from the world, but protecting the world from us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the parade, in the evening, people start heading off to the parties. The killing happened around ten p.m. and I didn’t find out till around midnight. People had been arguing in the kitchen about the World Cup. Guatemalan funeral music by the San Lucas Band was playing, out of tune, slow. Then Ornette Coleman. The music soared. I felt the world drop out. I don’t quite know how to describe that simultaneity—of hearing that music, which I love and which to me is the sound of possibility and joy and collective potentiality, of what Coleman means by harmolodics, infinitely transposable in whatever register, whatever instrument, whatever key—you could call it queer if you wanted to do that—of hearing that music at the same time as that news. I don’t know what it means, I’m not writing to turn this into a metaphor or an allegory or to makes sense of it, I’m writing it because I have to, I’m writing it to register the loss. Mourning is about revision and return, repeating that initial moment of knowledge, replaying it. It’s a loop, yet it develops; it moves forward, yet it stays in the same place. I’m writing this two days later but I’m still in that kitchen, the world is still dropping out, Ornette is still playing, the San Lucas Band are still playing, and I’m still in that kitchen. I don’t know who they were, the person who was killed, I don’t know their name, and I mourn their absence, that gap. The driver of the van attacked people with a knife or a machete after ramming the van into people on the path and fled. And I don’t know who they were either. And I’m still in that kitchen and already I’m thinking, if it’s an Islamist attack, queers will be used as convenient propaganda—never more convenient than when dead—against whoever it is the state wants to kill, deport. Whoever it was who drove that van could equally well have been one of the white supremacist AfD supporters at the counter-protest staged earlier that day. And if it’s not an Islamist attack, we’re just dispensable: they’ll gloat, those other AfD supporters, CDU supporters, and all their unaffiliated supporters, privately, in their homes, or publicly, online: they’ll cheer the death; they’ll smirk at our loss.

So say what. Stay alert. Some platitude of the sort. Mourn, but don’t let them use us, use you.

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I wrote those last lines the same night. The next day, the news comes out in more detail. Wanted posters on digital screens. Perpetrator, Islam, terror attack, plastered everywhere, all over the newspapers, all over the city, and the victim still not even named. The year before, the Chancellor had described raising a queer flag over the Bundestag as akin to treating it as a “circus tent”. Today, the national flag is lowered to half-mast in a gesture that passes as “solidarity”. But I don’t really know what’s worse. This half-mast show, as if there were some sort of unity between the national flag and a flag that should negate the idea of the nation, of this nation, entire. Already the videos coming out, this instrumentalised commentary that is the opposite of mourning, that is like spitting in the faces of the dead. Already the voices of the AfD and its cheerleaders in the right or the so-called “centre” raising themselves. A white blonde Woman on Welt says “Political Islam kills” and talks about Hamas and “irregular migration”, as if that had anything other than precisely fuck all to do with any of this. “Deport all dangerous individuals”, says someone else. (The attacker was born in Germany.)

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So mourning is once again becoming a weapon against those it’s supposed to protect. But you still have to mourn. Where does that feeling go. Who becomes a part of the “we” imposed like an unwanted national flag, vampirically, over the bodies of the dead. The flag doesn’t absorb the blood that flows from the body, it doesn’t stanch the wound. Rather, it is the very thing that sucks the blood out: blood spread into its colours, blood the basis of its being.

It’s not my nation and it’s not flag. But these are, I feel, my dead, not the dead of those nation and flag who opportunistically claim them; not directly, but still, my dead, and I mean that internationally— these dead, not dead to be recuperated by nations and borders but dead who belong beyond those borders; my dead, in whatever way one might take that to mean, without taking any ownership. The person who was murdered was visiting from Poland with her daughter; the killer was German. No nation owns that death.

These dead my dead, because, yes, whatever it was Donne said about diminishment and involvement and nothing in itself entire, yes, that, perhaps, but more specifically: this person is dead because they were queer or they were seen as queer or they were in a queer space, a space that was, for that moment, queered, and because those have been or are my spaces, too. And because of that, because when I heard the news the world dropped out, because this next day and the day after I still can’t get it out of my head—because of all this, I still have to mourn.

I tried to do that by writing a poem. This is hardly a poem. On the afternoon of the next day I pace around inside and it starts to rain and I stay inside and eventually I cycle over to the vigil by the Brandenburger Tor. It starts to rain again, then it stops, then it starts again. This is hardly a poem. Soon after I arrive they finish clearing away the barriers by the gate. A tourist takes a series of selfies in the vacated space, oblivious, smiling away. On the ground on the raised bit of pavement there are rainbow and trans flags, placards, candles. By now, early evening, some hours after the vigil began, swelling to ten thousand people, the crowd is small, but still present. People stand here, they linger, they don’t just pass by, the group becoming in its silence rather than its noise a crowd. “And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” and the opening of the seal signalled the end of whatever world and you know all the noise that will follow. Here, it’s quiet, respectful. I realise I haven’t brought any flowers with me to lay so I leave nothing but my temporary presence. People look dazed. Some quietly crying. Older gays and younger queers, mainly but not exclusively white. Some Zionists holding up a sign saying “this is what happens when you globalise the intifada” are eventually persuaded to leave. Then I notice after a while that the rainbow flag carried by the woman sitting quietly near the centre has a Star of David in the middle. Next to me are some people with a keffiyeh and a keychain with Palestinian flags. Who do you think I felt safer standing next to.

And it’s not, not really, my safety that’s the issue. Or not the me, not the we, the state might take me to be.

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I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think of Tiergarten now without thinking about the attack. About its political uses by the predictable barrage of right-wingers calling for “re-migration” and denouncing Islamist terror as proxy for their racist nationalism. About the Zionist flags I saw at the vigil. About the feeling of the ground opening up, the world dropping out, and at the party, when I heard the news, I didn’t know what to say or what to do so said my goodbyes without comment and I left, quietly, as if ashamed.

The driver of the van attacked people with a knife or a machete after ramming the van into people on the path and fled. Later, when he ran at them with the same weapon in an allotment in Spandau, the cops shot him. As if this was some sort of satisfactory conclusion. But likely, it’s only the beginning. They will talk about “protecting” us and there will more cops on the parade to police us and to police real or imagined threats, and white blonde women and straight men on Welt will say things like “political Islam kills” and talk about Hamas and “irregular migration”, and the head of the Alternativ für Deutschland will condemn the killing knowing full well that many of their supporters are delighted by it on all counts, the cops killing the Muslims killing the queers, two birds with one stone.

“And many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.”

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Recorded by ethnomusicologists, the music of the San Lucas Band was nominated for a Grammy Award and the musicians were displaced and probably killed in the Guatemalan Civil War, with its genocide of indigenous populations and activists. The Kaqchchikel musicians, survivors of the Mayan populations decimated by the conquistadors and their massacres and the diseases they brought, tried to bend the western instruments they’d been left and the funeral march melodies and dirges they were playing into the microtonal inflections their own traditions encompassed. It’s as if you can hear the music break under the strain, and yet it stays together.

The evening of the Monday after, the sirens seem to have not stopped sounding. Cops on my road. As if their music were any less sickening or inappropriate than whatever threat it is they are supposed to protect whatever “we” it is they think they are protecting us against.

I refuse it, I refute it, I am not that we.

The vigil was silent but after it I needed to hear something, and so, over these past days, I listened to ‘Atomic Peace’ and ‘Altruvista’ and ‘I Want to See You’ by Alice Coltrane, recorded after John Coltrane’s death, and to ‘Vigil’ by John Coltrane, recorded in watchfulness before his own, and I listened to John Corigliono’s AIDS Sympony, its first movement, titled Of Rage and Remembrance, and I listened again to the San Lucas Band, and they all finish playing. For now, Coltrane’s Meditations is the only purgation that will do, for each sound that comes out on the record sounds like it’s about to break in two. There is no mourning here that is not screaming. No screaming that is not mourning. Multiphonic. Flame. Flowers by a monument in the rain. Flowers by a grave.

And then again silence.

Not to let such a death be used, and not to let it be in vain.

25^th-28^th July 2026

For the victim of the attack on Saturday

and for all those it will be used against

Ibrahim

Abdullah Ibrahim (1934-2026)

 

 Abdullah Ibrahim, pianist, now follows James Blood Ulmer, guitarist, who died a few weeks ago; Sonny Rollins, saxophonist, who passed a few weeks before Ulmer; Gunter Hampel, multi-instrumentalist, former husband of Jeanne Lee, who passed a few weeks before Rollins; David Henderson, poet, who wrote so much of the music, and who passed a few days before Hampel; Éliane Radigue, composer, who passed a few months prior to Henderson. From the music and back into it, the song they have all become.

I sometimes wonder, speculatively, if the reasons these artists are dying now, the way that they are, falling like dominoes, it seems, is not just because of the gradual loss of generation, the inevitable factor of ageing—that “natural” fact that is also never not socially experienced, socially produced—but because the world they spoke into and of has not come to pass, because we are letting the world as it exists now continue, because that world continues in “our” name. For those who create another world in their art still have to survive this one, even when they ride the relatively safe zones of shelter atop the rising waters around.

I wonder, that there is no space for their spirit in this new paradigm, even as a source for extraction, as the trillionaires openly talk what the economist William Nordhaus called the “euthanasia of the laboring classes”, the sacrifice of whole swathes of the global proletariat; as sanctioned genocides and ceasefires that are not ceasefires pummel themselves through misinformation and state enforcement and corporate profiteering; and yet vast swathes continue to believe, against their own interests, that it’s the weakest who are the greatest threat and who should be shouted down and cast out, repelled with ocean mines or border fences or burned out of their houses in the pogroms in all but name flaring across every continent on the planet.

I think of these litanies for artists I always seem to be writing, turning passage into a factor of continuance, the pathos they’re sold on, the retrospective backwards glance always preferred to the moment of live lithe late work, contradiction and difficulty: late work, even where that entails the repetition of a set repertoire, a set of stuttered stammered stumbling looping paths back to the source, like the story I was told about the bandleader who, fluid as ever in their playing, would nonetheless keep calling the same tune, over and tune, until reminded (by ear) to move on. I think of mourning, melancholia, nostalgia, the logic of defeat and loss: turning ever backward toward the city on the hill or the burning city or the city overwhelmed by flood, refusing to move on. Making garlands out of the wreckage, spreading magic carpets there. Dwelling excessively on the pathos of ending, addicted to cadence, to the closing chord, replayed. A heritage industry of embalmed corpses, a Lenin’s tomb of art.

I think of those litanies of artists and then I think of other lives, other names. Yves Sakila killed by security guards in Ireland. The four migrant workers burned alive in an attack on their car by gangmasters in Italy—not named. Those killed in Israeli airstrikes on Beirut, “ceasefire” or no ceasefire—not named. How, in writing, to do anything but juxtapose those lists; how to do anything but turn them into lists.

But music, it’s been said, is the last of the senses to leave: after language, on the edge of consciousness, life/death, waking/dream. Is limbo, the gate to pass through. So to remark on that moment at its ending is part of the work that music does, in trance erasing beginnings, endings, in cadence prolonging or truncating them.

In September 2024, I wrote on Ibrahim's performance at HKW in Berlin. That post is here: https://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2024/09/you-invest-in-loss-abdullah-ibrahim-live.html

what is left if we aren't the world

Reproducing here liner notes to a new CD released by Edition Wandelweiser Records containing realisations of Emmanuelle Waeckerlé’s score what is left if we aren’t the world: recordings from 2022—an early home recording, the premiere performance in Amsterdam—with one of the 2023 Klangraum performances, from earlier in the week, and a later performance in Thessaloniki, all with different ensembles.

Emmanuelle and I met around Eddie Prévost’s weekly workshops a few years ago and we discussed this score soon after it had been written. The following summer, I witnessed and took part in the closing realisation of this piece at the Wandelweiser gathering, Klangraum, in Düsseldorf, the weather humid, changeable and breaking outside. (I wrote a brief report on the festival for The Wire, but its impact on me goes beyond critical summary.) The format of the gathering involves pieces being performed—one might say ‘workshopped’—every day for an entire week. It takes quite something for a piece, however open the score, to sutain that amount of attention, but what is left if we aren’t the world more than does this.

Over the past few years, I’ve found the piece a way to think and feel about what it feels like now—it makes a cameo in a book of poems I’ve been working on for the past few years called On Musical Objects—and I was honoured to write the liner notes to this CD release (for which Ryan Dohoney also provides a typically astute take). As upcoming performances in the context, not of music, but of performance art, activism, and discursive practices, suggest, what is left continues to evolve, and I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing about future iterations.

Until we are done, until we feel or sound indistinguishable from what is there…

what is left if we aren’t the world?

Emmanuelle Waeckerlé’s piece is a placeholder, a holding place, holding space. A way to respond to the alarming and sudden cessation of social life during the pandemic—whether that was experienced as ending, as interlude, or as a kind of new beginning. The piece has its origin in a recording of Emmanuelle’s voice and the wind on a stormy night in lockdown: the voice alone, but not alone, the wind its own kind of breath, one that doesn’t need a body to breathe through, to keep going or to preserve. what is Left, the ensemble piece that emerged from this, is a way of collectivizing that aloneness. From I to We, always asking who “we” are; who is allowed to be “we”.

A year after the premiere in Amsterdam, the piece was performed five times at the Jazz-Schmiede, Düsseldorf, as part of the long-running Wandelweiser gathering, Klangraum. Lines were blurred between rehearsal, performance, and composition. Whatever their role in a particular piece, everyone is a listener, with listening a shared activity orienting us to each other and towards the world. The piece was workshopped: not as a precursor to something finished, but as part of an ongoing process, in which the discussions that surrounded the piece—how to perform it, what it means—are just as much a part of the piece as its score or a performance of that score.

what is left if begins with “pandemonium”, an explosion of sound which can be alternately joyous, explosive, or wracked, gradually fading out into a silence in which musicians and environment merge. Composed during Covid, it indexes that desolate time, but also the ways in which chaos continues to form the underlying, unstable ground of our equally uncertain present. This kind of collective catharsis is a space for grief as well as rage, and for the networked, swarm intelligence of collective sound-making occurring within the framework of a social relation of mutual attention and care. To go beyond ourselves whilst also digging deep into those parts of ourselves that we’ve forced ourselves to suppress, in order to go on: those huge griefs that, during the pandemic, we lived with and then had to force ourselves to forget; the ongoing griefs of the catastrophes we’re living through now, five years on.

I’m struck by the instruction in the score: “pandemonium [...], but not an apocalypse”. Because the idea that everything has ended is perhaps too easy, even as the possibility of planetary extinction becomes more and more palpable. How do we cope with an end that is not an end? How do we go on? The score opens at the moment when one doesn’t quite believe what’s happened, and continues into the moment where we try to hold onto the beliefs that sustained us up to this point, and to integrate—or to refuse to integrate—the new knowledge that trauma brings. “finding ourselves inside of something.” Finding something inside of ourselves. Keeping moving.

Within these sounds we hear the reflection of the horrors of where we are, all the things that block us truly being together—the anxieties, the cruelties, the hierarchies, the pettiness, the violence, the mistrust, the fear. But we also hear the possibility of what it would mean to be together, truly, glimpsed, briefly: a fraction of a second, a sliver of a sound.

Both the self and the tutti fall apart. And this is where we have to start. For after we figure out what’s left, the question is, as Emmanuelle says, “what to do?”

July 2025

Altissimo (The Cry): Preview

Sonny Rollins on the Williamsburg Bridge, October 7, 1961 © Atsuhiko Kawabata (photographer) /Hanako Kawabata. First published in Jazz Times.
 

A subscriber post on Substack, on the late Sonny Rollins.

There’s a radio recording from the Half Note in 1966 (or perhaps 1963, depending which discography you use): Rollins with McCoy Tyner, Walter Booker, and Mickey Roker, moving in and out of tunes at will; melody stacked free associatively on melody—rhapsody, in the sense of rhapsōidos, “stitcher of songs”, as if Rollins might play every song he knew, that act of association and recall a kind of survival force. Rollins was always walking around the club while he was playing, walking off stage while he was playing, playing within the form: having already begun as he stepped out of the taxi and walked into the venue, or deciding to take a trip up the stairs and out of the club to serenade Alice and John Coltrane in their home, followed by the remnants of the faithful. Sound bouncing off buildings, the walls, sound that would not be contained.

Walking while playing evokes the barwalkers, the entertainers of R&B, movement that refuses fixity; it’s a way of thinking, an exercise of freedom, a desite to get away, an impatience with the limitations of the form or the stage. This movement doesn’t translate to recordings; registers, instead, as a kind of sudden absence. In his unaccompanied cadenza on the Half Note recording, there are huge pauses as he moves around the room, testing the space: interruption, tension, void. All the more so given that these performances were broadcast on the radio, where they become dead air. But, rising again, resurrecting across the silence, Rollins comes back, the melody comes back, the force of remembrance, re-membered: a body put back together, gathering the limbs of Osiris. One tune becomes another, ‘Oleo’ to ‘Poinciana’ to ‘Happy Birthday’ to a newly abstract or abstruse motif: all those moments where what’s quoted and what is the thicket in which quotation occurs constantly blur and stretch, the earworm always within reach.

"and the music is unstoppable..." (Preview)

A subscriber post on Substack, on the great bassoonist Karen Borca.

Outside the by-now better-known names of free jazz, Borca’s work offers few external hooks or ways into the music: no Sun Ra theatricality, no Cecil Taylor ritual, no Archie Shepp radical traditionalism. It is a music that speaks for itself, and that demands a commitment of understanding on the part of the listener that moves beyond the merely illustrative. The music does not illustrate something: it is that thing itself. It asks the listener to dig as deep as the musicians dig, to stay with it, to sharpen their faculties on its sharpening invention. But to do so, to stick with it, is one of the richest rewards this music offers.

Borca’s music is work, in all its sense: playing as labor and as invention, the work of intense involvement with the material of sound and its transformation, dancing on the edge, dancing in your head; the work required by the listener to join the dance and be spun up too in it; work as in a product, a body of work, meaningful evidence offered up to the world as to the impact and beauty and grace and power of a person’s art, their contribution to the world. And as work, it seems to sing of the negation of work as exploitation and the emergence of some other form of situation, of invention, the rearrangement of the self in the multiple networks of the social, following the line, worrying it, seeing where it might lead. Work. Good news. And yes, the blues.

We can study this, we can listen to it, we can thrill to it, we can learn from it.

Poetry + Music this Saturday

A relatively spontaneous announcement of a relatively spontaneous gig: this for a new quartet combining poetry and music, with myself (poetry), Andrea Burelli (voice, poetry, perhaps violin), Lucio Capece (bass clarinet), and Stellan Veloce (cello). It will happen at the Casino for Social Medicine at Sonnenallee 100, Berlin, on this coming Saturday, 16th May, at 19h.

As a trio, Stellan, Lucio and I worked together twice last year, and that was beautiful. (Their duo at a performance a few months before the first of those occasions, after which I approached them to work together, was even more beautiful). As a quartet with Andrea, we’ve done one rehearsal so far, and I think it’s entering a whole new dimension, which I’m very excited about.

Also reading will be Tracy Fuad. And I’m excited about that, too.

Do come if you can.

More performances to be confirmed in due course!

J.H. Prynne (1936-2026)

Reposting here a piece which just appeared on the excellent online journal Little Mirror alongside Luke Roberts’ collection of Prynne memories. Many thanks to the editors. A longer and more detailed piece on J.H. Prynne will follow elsewhere in due course.

The poet J.H. Prynne died last Wednesday morning.

Jeremy was important to a whole host of us down the generations, for a whole host of reasons: politically, personally, and above all, poetically. For his avant-gardism; for his careful, critical, ethical attention to the specifities of poetic language; for his unorthodox Maoism, however that was understood; for his personal kindness and encouragement; for the kinds of permission his work opened up. Of the poems written during the period I knew him, the most important to me remains the life-work summary of Kazoo Dreamboats, written during the era of the financial crisis through the lens of Piers Plowman’s societal vision, via modern scientific textbooks, ancient funeral rites, and Maoist dialectics. A particularly treasured memory is Jeremy’s reading of a substantial portion of this poem to the student occupation of Lady Mitchell Hall, Cambridge in November 2011, alongside the veteran feminist campaigner and author Selma James. Insisting on making this a poem which could speak to the occasion and the political struggle, without compromising the fierce difficulty of the work itself, the reading was forceful and moving. When he read out the line “Rule One: people with top pay are rubbish”, the room was electrically charged, a charge that seemed to come both from the poem and to enter into the poem from outside. What I learned from this moment was that the poem itself does not change its context, nor does the context change the poem: but that their dialectical relation adds something to both.

Poster for the event hosted by Cambridge Defend Education at which J.H. Prynne read from Kazoo Dreamboats, 27 November 2011

Other works from these years that I treasure: the “bruised compassionate dismay” of Of ^. the ^. Abyss, a pamphlet I had the honour of publishing, which overlays Victorian child cruelty and the present migrant crisis; and the enquiry into the entanglement of British imperialism with poetic song in Parkland: a complex, insistent and direct enquiry into how the poet can sing when empire starves those other “fair field full of folk” elsewhere; a poem which movingly and deeply wants to believe in the possibility of poetry as lyric joy, but is totally lacking illusion about poetry as salvation; a poem that ask how the poet can go on singing their song when that song gets conscripted as the national anthem; that treats poetry with a near-devotional cast, yet radically questions whether poetry is morally complicit with corrupt orderings, if not actively harmful, then at least insufficiently attentive to or able to frame harm; a poem concerned with a national verse tradition, that ruthlessly interrogates the bases behind that tradition in the interests of a fervent, anti-imperialist internationalism; a poem rigorously dialectical, as dialectic is a practice of dialogue and question in origin, but as it is also the ruthless criticism of all that exists, and the very conditions for that questioning.

Cover to J.H. Prynne, Parkland (Critical Documents, March 2020)

Language is no innocent playground, yet the ludic is important to Jeremy’s late work (much of it published by Ian Heames’s Face Press), with its insistence that contemplation, play, and purposive activity be not separated. I love, too, the playful and unsettling rhyming poems of Snooty Tipoffs, the dense compaction of Al Dente, the fables and orchards and tales and streams of language that are the river all those late books swim. But maybe most of all I love the text ‘No Universal Plan for a Good Life’, a didactic summary in clear prose of the ethical position Jeremy believes poetry to hold, written for the context of people’s struggle in Nepal. I treasure both the text itself and the act of imaginative extension and solidarity it performs. And this is what I want to hold onto, about J as a person and about his work, this act of imaginative solidarity, this absolute belief in the power of poetry, this ethical rigour, this thinking through of the question of spirit and matter, this permission and this belief that poetry matters. I think I’ll carry that with me throughout my life. I hope I do so.

At play and at work there in language, into which he has now gone—at play and at work and now and then at rest—a life.

Wednesday 22 April 2026