Sound Installations and Composed Environments
Cordillera
Poetry and Reading by Norbert Ruebsaat
A composed environment for 4-channel audio, Length: 45 Minutes
Cordillera is a compositional working of Norbert Ruebsaat's reading of the long title poem from his book Cordillera.The piece combines the voice with environmental sound from the landscape-the Western Canadian mountain wilderness-which first inspired the poems, and thus places them back into their correct context.
Cordillera means a ridge or chain of mountains. It is also used generically to describe the continuous range stretching from Tierra Del Fuego to Alaska. The poem describes an ascent and movement through the high country. It is composed of 17 shorter poems or "snapshots" of specific locations, and these are each given their own acoustic shape as the composition proceeds.
Cordillera is about landscape, about wilderness, about the human presence and voice in places that are still considered by many to be barren and silent. It attempts to bring back to the city listener the sense of space, time and acoustic identity we experience when we manage to tear ourselves from the noise that clutters most of our daily lives.
Cordillera was commissioned by and first installed as an acoustic environment at the Western Front Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, for its New Wilderness Festival in the Spring of 1980.
Hildegard Westerkamp
Listen to two poem excerpts here, read by Norbert Ruebsaat, or discover them within the context of the poems that follow, which are featured in Ruebsaat's poetry collection Cordillera, (reprinted here with permission).
The poems that follow have been reprinted with permission from the author and publisher.
They appear in: *CORDILLERA* by Norbert Ruebsaat, published by Pulp Press, Vancouver, Canada, 1979
I
the echo, returning from the valley
does not recognize my voice,
the wind will not release
the presence of a breathing thing,
sheer rock is faceless fact
waterfall thoughtless waterfall
tightens
tightens
bends from the mountainlip
leans into air
burns into gravity
there where the fish feed
silent, as bubbles
*
I have been here briefly
like hands in a glove,
slyly, like winter
I have been here briefly,
crept into the cold
like fingers
I have been here briefly
like skin
like touch
like fur
like frost
& now I vanish
like traces of blood
*
ten winters carved in my palm
ten winters pushed into flesh,
this valley was my hope among the fleeing peaks
the charged rocks
the tree-line
traced like a knife-wound
there were places that throbbed with undergrowth,
fat as moss
or the great swell of cedar,
places
hungry with insects,
the mud flesh of creekbeds
this valley
which did not want want me,
never needed me,
was immune to my glass - like skin
this valley
deep as the moon,
a place you could plunge
a knife into
*
hands
hands cupped & blown into, hands
slapped against shoulders,
rubbed in the snow
hands deep in pockets,
curled into fists,
tight hands
clasped between thighs,
under armpits
hands with blue knuckles
white, dreaming, trembling hands,
bone hands,
hands rubbed together
like a pair of sticks
*
deep green pools
like a knife thrust in
& the green leaks out
these are the silent pools
formed out of twilight
pools like blank eyes
like ears
where there hasn't been sound
pools-in-the-stone
in the grip of stone
in the jaws of stone
pools held like iron
or water
here are the jade fish
fragments of light
ice-pools
frosting over
that sound
*
II
ice which contains
the secret memory of water,
ice which is nearly
mad from the cold
ice which knows
the amazement of rock,
the time it takes for the echo
*
the fists became dreaming
geological beings,
coiled into violence,
the shape of a scream
the fists collected the cold & the silence
into a kind of sinew
the fists became blind
like a rock is blind
fists cut off
from the stump of the wrist
*
birds of prey here,
lean cunning birds,
shaped like the break in a bone
razor-birds
cut out of stone,
suspended by hooks from the sky
keen-sighted birds
sheer
as a dagger
flesh-eaters
blood-dreams
angles-in-space
*
here on the edges
here on the talus slopes
slate-grey cliffs
I try out my human voice
try-out-my-human-voice
human voice echo
human voice stone
human voice thunder recoils like a blow
like a fist hurled through into silence
the jagged black line of a crow
tears across the sky,
red on its beak,
spawning
III
now everything has eyes
now everything is ice
now everything has teeth
small uncertain cracks
things with no names
creep from beneath the mineral blocks
like a species
not yet invented
mica-eyes
flakes,
nothing has been here
*
no earth for this conversation
no gravity
no language for it
deep in the earth
a thinking starts,
a muscle begins to dream
a scarlet trickle forms
a form of pain leaks out
& tightens
I must not lose my footing
here among the stones,
this crossing
hazardous as bones,
treacherous as eyes
a thin muscle of water
curls & grips my calf,
silent, unbending
*
ice which contains
the secret memory of water,
ice which is nearly
mad from the cold
ice which knows
the amazement of rock,
the time it takes for the echo
*
the fists became dreaming
geological beings,
coiled into violence,
the shape of a scream
the fists collected the cold & the silence
into a kind of sinew
the fists became blind
like a rock is blind
fists cut off
from the stump of the wrist
*
birds of prey here,
lean cunning birds,
shaped like the break in a bone
razor-birds
cut out of stone,
suspended by hooks from the sky
keen-sighted birds
sheer
as a dagger
flesh-eaters
blood-dreams
angles-in-space
*
here on the edges
here on the talus slopes
slate-grey cliffs
I try out my human voice
try-out-my-human-voice
human voice echo
human voice stone
human voice thunder recoils like a blow
like a fist hurled through into silence
the jagged black line of a crow
tears across the sky,
red on its beak,
spawning