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Horizontal Gaze

from Speech Songs by Haworth Hodgkinson

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about

When I read my poem "Seaside Elephant" in performance, people often laugh, and to some extent it may be taken as a comic poem, but to me there's also a serious side to it. It's about the apparent absurdity of human endeavour, the patience needed to see a project through to completion, and the fact that the end result might not be quite what we anticipate. The first piece I made on this poem was the 2007 miniature study that now concludes "Six Weaknesses", heard earlier on this album, but I began to feel its haunted distortions of the text beyond recognition were just a brief snapshot of something that could be much longer. "Horizontal Gaze", composed in two phases in 2013 and 2014, expands the miniature onto a timescale more suited to the idea of staring out to the far sea horizon, watching the light slowly changing, and waiting patiently for a fabled sea creature to make an appearance.

At the beginning, the text of the poem is heard relatively undistorted, with the 2007 miniature as a backdrop. This fades to reveal a second section in which two extremely slowed down readings of the text in canon sound like some kind of creatures of the deep. These are accompanied by drones made by stretching fragments of the original study to enormous lengths. Layers build in the third section as the original reading returns, slowed down but still recognisable as a voice, and the 2007 miniature reappears, laid over the stretched-voice sea monster canon, the drones, and a new irrational drone. The layers suddenly fall away, leaving only the drones in the fourth section. Background has become foreground, and the drones, now isolated, are revealed to be much more complex than they first seemed, gently pulsing and breathing until they are mysteriously silenced by a second intervention of the irrational drone.

lyrics

Seaside Elephant

On these shores
elephants are rare.
It must be the pebbles
they dislike.

But pictures of elephants
can be found in craft shops
everywhere.

I take a dozen small elephant pictures
and paste them to rocks along the tideline,
hoping their cousins will recognise
common spirit
and come to join them.

My camera is primed,
my microphone tuned
to the trumpeting frequencies.

I wait.

Perhaps I should have brought
buns as an extra lure.

Only at dusk,
as the sky fades,
am I rewarded for my patience.

Out of the dark sea
looms a large shape:
an enormous
picture
of an elephant.

© Haworth Hodgkinson
from A Weakness for Mermaids (Koo Press, 2007)

credits

from Speech Songs, released October 25, 2015
Music composed, performed and recorded by Haworth Hodgkinson, 2013/2014.

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all rights reserved

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Haworth Hodgkinson image

Haworth Hodgkinson Scotland, UK

Composer, improviser and sound artist based in Aberdeenshire and inspired by the landscapes of the North of Scotland. Solo performances often combine poetry with live music. Has worked on many collaborations with writers, dancers, actors, musicians and visual artists. ... more

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