To Hear the Earth Before the End of the World

“Tuned to its grandest level, music, like light, reminds us that everything that matters, even in this world, is reducible to spirit.” Al Young Kind of Blue (1984)

To Hear the Earth Before the End of the World a rephrasing phrasing of poet Ed Roberson's book To See the Earth Before the End of the World) is a light and sound installation organized around elements of air, earth, fire, water, and the ether. The work includes field recordings Hamilton captured during his research and travels to Europe and North and South America where he gained what he calls "a ground zero understanding of our changing Earth. Hearing glaciers cracking, smelling forest fires, the mechanical cacophony of land being razed -all felt on a cellular level." In this installation, a ring of speakers plays long-form compositions of modulated environmental recordings intermixed with digital and instrumental sounds. Hamilton's music of landscapes features contrasting sounds of violent eruptions and lulling melodies. Audiences are invited to spend time within a heightened sensory environment wherein Hamilton asks us to listen to the sounds of a changing climate that involves both creation and destruction.

This work is on its third iteration. On view is the current iteration (installation) at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska (May 5, 2023- March 31, 2024) as well as the first iteration at Gray Area in San Francisco (2020, 2021)

Photo stills from To Hear the Earth Before the End of the World featuring brontë velez. Performed at Gray Area in SF, CA for Soundwave NEXT Festival

Photo Credit: Seabrook Gubbins for Gray Area

 Sonic Sketches

Sonic Sketches is a series of…well…sketches accompanying To Hear the Earth Before the End of the World. These are prequels, vignettes, dreams, note book entries, meditations rather than stand alone pieces.

Breath and growth

sprouting seeds breaking soil

 J.W, R.H, H.D, E.R, NHP (whispering of the self to the self) is a layered installation that combines the light touch of 100 ostrich feathers, the chiming of 1200 bells and the ethereal sound of three vocal artists (Anaïs Maviel, Wesley Chavis and Yaw Agyeman) to creates an immersive and meditative space. This installation emphasizes feeling and sound rather that the tradition visual centricity of sculpture. To quote curator Gee Wesley, the attempt is to “question how synesthetic experience can enable moments of collective being and move sculpture away from an ableist supremacy of the visual to a bodily experience of feeling.”

The initials in the title belong to five of the many poets who have informed my practice. JW is for Jay Wright, RH Robert Hayden, HD Henry Dumas, ER Ed Roberson, NHP Norman H Pritchard. This is work is a portrait of their influence on me and an example of my commitment to the working principle of Transrealistic Poetics which I’ve adopted for my practice.

“Whispering of the self to the self” is a line from my journal and encompasses what I hoped to achieve with this work. In the this flux world the act of meditation is a radical act. This work hopes to provide that space for those who need it.

The most important quality of this work is the sound. The vocal piece is the result of another type of collective meditation. Created individually, each artist responded to a score composed of lines from the aforementioned poets and an Anthony Braxton style notation to prompt exploration. The results were composed by me into the 25 minute track as one V. Le remarked “it’s reminiscent of Marion Brown’s Afternoon of a Georgia Faun”. The clusters of 1200 bells of varying tones gives a tactile-acoustic element that furthers the meditation and combine, if the visitor gives themselves to the experience, can create a truly transcendental space.

On a Stairway Beneath the Eyes a Star Ascended is a four stanza poem written in braille installed at the Drawing Center in New York during the Open Session 12 exhibition. Unlike how braille is traditionally encountered, this work is much larger, measuring roughly 8ft across and 5ft in height with the braille cells + dots approximately 1 1/2in. It is also constructed from foam paper (which the dots were cut out of by hand, by me). The line breaks on the wall variegate touch creating an encounter, an environment for the poem as it becomes deciphered. The disorientation of the installation creates a meditation regardless if the poem is read line by line or not. In this way, a palindrome effect is created and words are encountered leaving one to keep reading for context. This, of course, is from the perspective of someone blind or visually impaired (or sighted but able to read braille with eyes closed). The idea is a meditation, a stillness. I hope the text translates this. Below is both the view of the braille installation and the text form of the poem.

The imagistic title “stairway beneath the eyes, a stairway a star ascended” comes from Nathaniel Mackey who used the phrase in his essay Sight-Specific, Sound Specific referring to an interpretative slip while Robert Duncan (“As a star in the stare under the closed lids” Duncan). 

Performance work

Evil Nigger pt 1-5 at The Kitchen, NYC Jan 2018; w/ Jeremy Toussaint Baptise, Andre Zachery, Shantelle Courvoisier Jackson & Nyugen Smith; Photo by Cameron Kelly; All Rights Reserved- the artists, ISSUE PROJECT ROOM and The Kitchen

Untitled (Liner Notes to Evil Nigger Performance for Julius Eastman) by LaMont Hamilton

“the reason why i use that particular word is because
it has a, what i call, basicness about it. That is to say[…]the first niggers were field niggers
and upon that is the basis of the american economic system…
That is what i call the first and great nigger, field niggers.
And what i mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental. 
that person or thing that attains to a basicness, a fundamentalness
and assuage that thing which is…elegant.”

What does it mean to be hideously elegant?
To exhibit grace in the face of a brutal and regulative existence of a system
built precisely on the grounds or field which blood bone soil, blood bone foundation
is located in the economy of your disagreeable blackness. ‘That which is fundamental’ 
to this economy- your death as capital. 
The Nigger as an uncomfortable prefiguration of unrequited entanglement with capital. 

At the locus of this (beyond) conceptualization is, once again, 
the iconic figure of the black slave who's representation
(in the deepest depths of the darkest well flickering light on the wall,
face and eyes raised and turning to coming of the day)
is all that which is most complex about this country. 
or a complex, to put it more straight. There are facts. 
Nigger as (de) composition of damnation and saving grace. 
Despised inamorat(a)o who’s flesh must be incessantly consumed
for the basic american economic system survival.  

More boldness. 

“A nigger attains himself or herself to the ground of anything. 
thats what i mean by nigger so there are many niggers, 
there are many different kinds of niggers. 
there are, of course, 99 names of Allah but there are 52 niggers.” 

Attaining and attending to the grounds. The soil. 
Imagine a tilling and unearthing of artifacts that reveal talismans.
Mythical figures that initiate a multitude of declensions. 
(a rush of white noise) (fade)
Blood bone deep dig that, in the golden ray of remembered
forgotten memory, revealed mustard seed sized magic
that eclipses the initial forecast of simply evil, crazy and good niggers to unveil a much deeper than imagined, 52 Niggers.
(rush of astonished gasps) (white noise. temporarily off air) 
And at that, a lesser god. Blossomed.
Blooming of buried blood bone deep seeds
into radical presences.

Dawn is approaching. New Day

Dear Julius,
There is not much more to say except Thank You. And please accept this work of art as a sincere act of love and devotion.

Yours with love,

The One(s) Dedicated to Emancipation

*(Quotes are from Julius Eastman’s Introduction to his 1980 concert at Northwestern University

Five on the black hand side/

Dapline!

Five on the Black Hand Side

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