Doodlebug, Fiddlebug, Fiddlehead, Fidgetglyph

Today, I received the following drawing from kiyotei. (This is how this blog is supposed to work, by the way--by reporting on mailart as it arrives!)

kiyotei is of that type of mailartist I most admire (but don't at all emulate). He, like Roy Arenella, creates art that reacts to the art he receives. This method creates an almost collaborative art and truly brings the process of mailing and exchanging of art into the process of creating mailart.


kiyotei, "Dead Fiddlebug" (19 May 2005)
What this little drawing does is riff off part of a fidgetglyph entitled "ovo" that I sent him. kiyotei (again, like Roy Arenella) seems to have been intrigued by the weird mandibular conclusion to that fidgetglyph, so this drawing incorporates that portion of the fidgetglyph into his drawing (as its head)--thus tranforming it into a fidgetglyph. Of course, we have to assume that the bug is a fiddlebug (which we can tell from the decoration on its underside and the title on the other side of the card) because kiyotei was thinking of fidgetglyphs.

But, best of all, kiyotei has no idea that I had fiddleheads for dinner last night. Fiddleheads (the curved heads of opening ferns) are among my favorites vegetables, and they are available only for a small period of time each spring. I'm thinking of making a fiddlehead pie over the weekend--if the fiddleheads can hold out long enough.

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Water, Water Everywhere, and Every Drop is Ink: "The Inevitable Course of Water" (qbdp # 59)

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

I prepared another card with another one of these calligraphic characters today. I don't think this one is as successful as the one from yesterday. Today, we leave the family's Adirondack camp, so mailart will stop coursing from me for a little while--until I hit the road again.


Geof Huth, "The Inevitable Course of Water" (30 May 2005)
The recipients of "The Inevitable Course of Water" (qbdp # 59) were as follows:

1/7 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/7 Bob Grumman

3/7 Roy Arenella

4/7 Ruud Janssen

5/7 Reed Altemus

6/7 Erin Huth

7/7 qbdp

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The Parts of the Letters: "The Monogram of Titus the Great" (qbdp # 58)

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

I've continued my experiments with my new steel brushes (a birthday gift) today. This time, I took a slightly different tactic. Rather than focusing on asemic or minimalist texts alone, I decided to focus on the parts of letters and rearrange them in single monogram-like text-clumps. What I discovered was that the parts of the printed letter are much different than the parts of the calligraphic letter, so this gave me an entirely different set of shapes to deal with. My favorites of these grams I called "The Monogram of Titus the Great," and I made thirteen copies of it on 13 identical found cards I had with me.


Geof Huth, "The Monogram of Titus the Great" (29 May 2005)
The recipients of "The Monogram of Titus the Great" (qbdp # 58) were as follows:

1/13 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/13 Bob Grumman

3/13 Roy Arenella

4/13 Ruud Janssen

5/13 Reed Altemus

6/13 Jassy Lupa

7/13 Scott Helmes

8/13 RF Côté

9/13 Erin Huth

10/13 frips

11/13 Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

12/13 Scott McDonald

13/13 qbdp

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The Art of It: "Rt" (qbdp # 57)

Still Point, Caroga Lake, New York

The summer has begun because my family is spending the long weekend in our "ancestral" camp (cottage) by the shore of East Caroga Lake. Being away from home, I felt compelled to create some mailart, so I took one of the shortest visual poems I've ever made (a mere 1.5 letters in length, a creation of last night's experiments with my new steel pens [a birthday present]) and affixed it to the outside of an envelope the inside of which is a detailed road map. Inside the envelope, I placed a sheet of paper holding a failed experiment from last night's inking. This sheet I folded "message" side out, the reverse of expectations, so that the recipient will unfold it to find no message at all. Of course, this is a riff on the envelope that carries the message. But I explained myself further with a note affixed to the premlip of the envelope: "the carrier of the message." I also "signed" the envelope with my calligraphic poem signature (little used): f.


Geof Huth, "Rt" (28 May 2005)
The people who will receive a copy of "Rt" (qbdp # 57, Scrapmail # 3) are as follows:

1/10 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/10 Bob Grumman

3/10 Roy Arenella

4/10 Mick Boyle

5/10 Ruud Janssen

6/10 Reed Altemus

7/10 Jassy Lupa

8/10 frips

9/10 Gustave Morin

10/10 qbdp

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Amazing, but True

Strangely, I am finally caught up with all my mailart documentation. I've no idea how I have suddenly become so fortunate, but today is like the beginning of a new year. I begin with a clean slate. For the last round of mailart I've received, see the other postings (below) I've made today.

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Down with Sloganeering!

And now a message (attached to a trimmed piece of corrugated cardboard) from Roy Arenella:


Roy Arenella, "Think Globally" (17 May 2005)
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Frankly, Breeched

Not quite mailart, but sort of. Jassy Lupa sent me this stamping of Medusa atop an envelope that included a long letter recounting the recent birth of her second grandchild (which was exactly one month ago). Quite an exciting little story, with much going wrong (no birthing tub, early birth, missing midwife, a frank breech), but with everything working out perfectly in almost no time. Quite interesting to me, who have helped with each of the births of my children. But Jassy was the midwife for this birth, making it quite exciting. Luckily, she used to midwife professionally years ago!


Jassy Lupa, [Medusa on an Envelope] (15 May 2005)
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Since the Secret is Out

Not only is Ruud Janssen (see just below) about to move, so is Roy Arenella. I've been keeping this a secret for a few months now, but I've seen announcements elsewhere, so I can report that Roy is moving to nearby Greenwich (pronounced "Green Witch"), New York, which is about 40 miles from my home, out in the country, though, so about an hour from my home as well.

With very little in his home left unpacked, Roy announces that the "(purple) envelope isnt part of any mail art 'strategy.'" Inside he includes a simple little grid, filled with color and explaining that the X and the O are the secret heart of the alphabet. I have to admit that I'm not sure what that means. But the X and the O to me are element, one being about curves and the other being about straight lines, so that would be the answer from my point of view.


Roy Arenella, "The Secret Heart of the Alphabet" (13 May 2005)
This mailing is number 110C (C standing for "card") for Roy this year, which means that the move is slowing him down a bit. At about the same time last year, I was receiving a card numbered 204. No worries here. As we all know, mailart isn't everything.

It's the only thing.

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Ruud Janssen is Moving

Famed mailartist, Ruud Janssen, is moving sometime in the next couple of months, so this colorful painted card (a textual painting about images) announces his move. I'm not sure if I should start using this address now or not, but here it is for anyone who needs it. Ruud's also rethinking his life in mailart (something that occurs to any mailartist sometime), so we may see completely different output from Ruud in the future.


Ruud Janssen, 05-115 (13 May 2005)
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The Motile Screen of Grandeur

It's great to hear from j0llyr0ger after a short silence, and he's decided to break that silence with a cryptic text that looks to me like the transcription of a set of jeweler's marks hammered into the underside of a piece of jewelry.


j0llyr0ger, [Cryptic Text 1977] (3 May 2005)
Luckily, j0lly clarifies the text with the following message on the opposite side of the card:

On the periphery
of the motile
screen of grandeur

A call barters, refracted

In the circle of ambience
a finger raised
to point
through the sweet golden
gloom

SKYWARD

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Welcome to It

On April 25th, Reed Aletmus sent me one of his small packages of mailart. Inside were an announcement for his Copyartistamps show in Portland, Maine (which ends today); a postcard noting advertising the small press fair in Mainz, Germany (the city being just a letter away from "Maine"), and the following little visual poem.

Reed Altemus, "I T La" (2002)
Since Reed likes making poems that hint at, rather than use, words, this poem and others remind me of the scores for Dada sound poems. A wonderful little piece full of Reed's sure grasp of the printer's fist.

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In Contradiction with the Sky

The illusive Gustave Morin sent me the postcard below, which reproduces an old Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage, one I released back in March of 1988, the year before my son was born, when I still lived in Horseheads, New York. I love to see this recontextualization of my work--and to be reminded of the rough-hewn methods I used to create some of my micropublications in the past.


SJRC # 7, Postcarded by Gustave Morin (26 April 2005)
On the back of the envelope, Morin writes a note that covers every available open space. He writes quite a bit in this space and included everything except his address. My response to him has been delayed because of this, but Ross Priddle has kindly sent me this contact information for Morin, which I reproduce here for the advantage of anyone who has received mail from him but no return address.

Gustave Morin
COMMON GROUND
c/o Mackenzie Hall
3277 Sandwich St. West
Windsor, ON N9C 1A9 CANADA

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The Body as Creation

Luc Fierens sent me a nice little package back on April 24th along with quite a few of his little booklets. For now, I'm dealing with this as mailart posting, but I could just as easily have dealt with this a visual poetry. Fierens is a collagist and often works in concert with others to create his long-time series of Postfluxpostbooklets (now up to at least number 70), but most of his work is a kind of collage writing. He produces heavily visual collages with scraps of defining text: shards of dictionary pages, bold clippings that serve to entitle or direct the collage, and occasionally bits of text he's created himself.

His recent book, Living Sculptures is a good example of his technique. It is an insistent book, taking images of the human body torn from pages of magazines and newspers, and glueing them together in seemingly haphazard ways. But a direction is apparent. This is a book about the human impulse to modify one's own body in a vain search for a constant beauty. Mixing some French text with a bit of what I assume is Flemish (a dialect of Dutch) and much English, this book makes an interesting multi-national point about this tendency and its ultimate destructiveness.


Luc Fierens, Living Sculptures (2005)
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Say What You Feel

R.F. Côté sent me one of his series of collaged and painted postcards of women speaking in Braille. The concept is quite interesting, and it is striking how a simple concept so simply but effectively presented can suggest a number of readings. Note in this card, for instance, how small the mouth is in comparison to the come-hither eyes.



R. F. Cote, [Woman Speaking Braille] (23 Apr 2005)
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Smoke Gets in Your I's

I forgot about this little piece of emailart from Mick Boyle, which I received back at the beginning of April! A cute little piece, but I'm more apt to "misplace" emailed than a piece of paper mailart--which I keep in piles until I'm ready to mention it. Mick reports, by the way, that he's not sure if he thinks the smoke is exiting a smokestack or the bowl of a pipe.


Mick Boyle, "Geof-Smoke" (4 April 2005)
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The Day's Unevents

Today was another day for catching up with mailart. I scanned bits of every piece of mailart I had received but not yet documented. I added new photos of my mailart creation stations to earlier blog entries. I foldered--it's a term in archives!--my qbdp mailings. And I added nine new entries to the top of this blog. Sorry for the delay, but I almost believe I'll catch up sometime this week.

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Traces of Think under Local Clouds

Roy Arenella's letters are often an essential element of his mailart. They are quirky, intelligent, and human. I often think that I know Roy (whom I've met just once in a rush of activity between work assignments on one putative holiday in New York City) just from his letters. What he usually does in his letters, without even knowing it, is put me to shame with his knowledge of verbo-visual and other art. Reading his letters is a learning experience.

In the letter I received this time, he talks about a series of narrative visual poems of mine called Traces of Ink and makes references to Bob Brown's 1450-1950 (which I do know), Cendrar's "jolie page," and a book by Robert Pinget (who?) that goes by the title Traces of Ink. (I wonder if Pinget created his name from the same source as I: bokuseki [trans. "Traces of Ink" or "Ink Traces"], the term for Zen brush calligraphy. And now I've given away my secret.)

In this mailing, Roy sent me his letter, sections of Pinget's Traces of Ink copied onto a single page, a list of his photographs (entitled "Local Clouds") recently shown at the 55 Mercer Gallery, a poster advertising a show of his from 1974, and this wonderful "pretty page":


Roy Arenella, "He Wanted to Make" (13 April 2005)
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Like Spun Copper

This card of Ruud Janssen's is one in a series of visual poetic word paintings he has created. All the words, so far as I remember are English or English-sounding, but all are not "real" (or are not intended to be real). This one is my favorite of all these word paintings (though I like them all), so I was thrilled when I'd received it (having seen it posted earlier at Ruud's blog).

The yellow and copper paint on this painting make the piece dazzle. (I love the feel of paint on Ruud's cards, by the way, so I'm a little sad that a tiny bit of red has chipped off the S). The scene we see is the sun almost obscuring the sky, but Ruud has labeled the sun for us, in case we didn't recognize it. Along with this, we see the word "pun," though it's difficult to suggest a meaning for this word: maybe that the words we use are somehow puns for the objects and concepts they pretend to be. But what I like most is that the S and P can also work together to create "spun," suggesting the spinning of gold (in this case, copper) out of the sun.


Ruud Janssen, 05-105 (17 April 2005)
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The Pataphysician Writes before He Leaves

In his standard brown vlope, Reed Altemus sent me a sheet of pataphysical postage stamps (okay, artist's stamps), a brief note of a small press fair he was about to attend in Mainz, Germany (one of my favorite German cities), and a beautiful copy of his visual poem, "LVIFED," which I've written about elsewhere. So instead of showing you something Reed sent me, let me show you Reed himself.


Reed Altemus, Litsa Spathi, and Ruud Janssen
I'd like Reed and Ruud to exchange vowels for a day to see how it changes them. Or maybe they should develop a Reed-Ruud mailart collaboration.

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Postcard from Grenada

Now, it seems strange to me that this painted card of Ruud Janssen's (this one either an abstract or an extreme close-up on an impressionist painting) comes to me with a Grenadian stamp affixed to it--Grenada being in the Caribbean not too too far south of Barbados. To increase the weirdness, the stamp is a half-cent stamp (obviously, created for stamp collecting more than postage) that commemorates "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" (ditto).


Ruud Janssen, 05-098 (14 April 2005)
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Nutbutter on Bread on Board on Tiles on Card on Corrugated Cardboard

What I love about frips' mailart is that she frequently fastens pieces to her cards and envelopes with thread rather than the more usual glue. She uses a sewing machine to do this--a machine I much love, though I don't have much of one anymore, so I'm unlikely to follow her lead. I find this little fripsmailartphotocard quite wonderful in ways I cannot quite express. The simplicity of this tiny domestic scene, and the muted colors, and the bites taken out of the bread all make this a successful piece of art.

Either that, or I'm hungry. (Which I'm not.)


frips, [Nutbutter on Bread on Board on Tiles on Card on Corrugated Cardboard] (11 April 2005)
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The Crab's Eyes of Barbados

This wonderful little painting of Ruud Janssen's suggests to me something that it probably should not: the crab's eyes of Barbados. The crab's eyes is a plant that grows on that island, and this little painting reminds me of those red-eyed plants. The glossy seeds of the plant would entrance me when I was a boy, and I would collect handfuls of them and consider how similar they were to the eyes of crabs themselves (which were all around me: land crabs living in holes at the upper ends of beaches, fiddler crabs living in the brackish waters of estuaries, sand crabs living at the very edge of the water, and various nameless crabs living safely under the Caribbean sea rolling out like an aquamarine carpet to the horizon). Strangely, I had no idea until tonight that the seeds of the crab's eyes were so toxic.


Ruud Janssen, 05-089 (9 April 2005)
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The Woman Inside

Jassy Lupa sent me a long thin envelope she had constructed out of the stiff glossy pages of a fashion magazine. Inside of this envelope, she has inserted a long white sheet with four self-portraits--the first three on paper vellum glued along their top edges to the page, and the last being a carved stamping. She did a series of these mailings (apparently eleven of them), and I saw one on the Web someplace, but I can't remember where.

An interesting (intentional?) message here: that inside each glossy young woman there resides the old woman she will become. But what is our assessment of beauty?

Oh, she also chastises (admonishes, maybe--that's a bit milder) me not to disparage the mailart I send her. I will endeavor to do so!


Jassy Lupa, [Woman, Inside and Outside] (April 2005)
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Petroglyphic Imagination

I'm not sure I should speculate too much on this asemic bit of writing by kiyotei, because I'm so often wrong (but, boy, are those guesses of mine interesting!), but when I look at "de Shay" (which is the pronunciation of the "de Chelly" part of "Canyon de Chelly"), and when I look at kiyotei's wonderful photojournal (part of which documents the petroglyphs at Canyon de Chelly National Monument), I feel compelled to insist that this bit of asemic writing--wavering between script and pictogram--must be an homage to the peoples who created those petroglyphs.


kiyotei, "de Shay" (April 2005)
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Squares Fastened to Rectangles

I can't tell for sure who sent me this card stapled to another card. But the card comes to me from Toronto, the home of Nadja Sayej, so I'm guessing this Albersian card is from her. I collected the title for this piece from the card underneath the one in view.


Nadja Sayej, "Joseph Albers meets Hilton Kramer meets Rosalind Krauss meets" (April 2005)
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A Hard Card to Hoe: "A Selection from the Museum of Modern Writing" (qbdp # 56)

Best Western Golden Arrow Motel, Room 310, Lake Placid, New York

I'm in Lake Placid for a meeting with staff from work, so we end up talking until late into the night, which makes it difficult to produce anything. Luckily, I'd begun preparing these cards before arriving here in Placid.

The lucky recipients of these cards are as follows:

1/12 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/12 Bob Grumman

3/12 Roy Arenella

4/12 Ruud Janssen

5/12 R. F. Côté

6/12 Carol Stetser

7/12 kiyotei

8/12 Reed Altemus

9/12 Nadja Sayej

10/12 Luc Fierens

11/12 Nancy Huth

12/12 qbdp

Geof Huth, "A Selection from the Museum of Modern Writing"
(18 May 2005)


View from Room 310, Best Western, Lake Placid, New York
(19 May 2005)


Mailart Station, Best Western, Room 310, Lake Placid, New York (19 May 2005)
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The City Card and the Country Card: "leafves foleads" (12 May 2005)

Southgate Tower, Room 1902, New York, New York

While in Manhattan, and staying in a room with a good view of the nearby Empire State Building, I took a few postcards about life in the countryside and created a small fidgetglyph about leaves. I was so lazy that I produced only five cards.

The recipiencts of this mailing were as follows:

1/5 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/5 Bob Grumman

3/5 Roy Arenella

4/5 Ruud Janssen

5/5 qbdp

Geof Huth, "leafves foleads" (12 May 2005)
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A Grand Beginning: "ovo" (qbdp # 54)

The Poughkeepsie Grand, Room 617, Poughkeepsie, New York

I've returned to this hotel in downtown Poughkeepsie, because I needed to stay somewhere where I could walk to the train station tomorrow morning and get myself to New York. I have a view of the Hudson and the tall FDR Mid-Hudson Bridge from my window.

Always looking for ways to create quick mailart, I created a simple fidgetglyph upon a simple postal card. The following people received copies of "ovo" (qbdp # 54):

1/7 Ruth and Marvin Sackner

2/7 Bob Grumman

3/7 Roy Arenella

4/7 Ruud Janssen

5/7 Reed Altemus

6/7 kiyotei

7/7 qbdp

Geof Huth, "ovo" (11 May 2005)


Mailart Station, Poughkeepsie Grand Hotel (11 May 2005)
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Another Five

Ruud Janssen knows of my attraction to fives, which has to do with many things: the date of my birth, the number of my siblings, common forms of counting. So he sends me the fifth envelope in a series of seventeen. The outside of the envelope is pretty much a traditional painted envelope of Ruud's, but not quite; it's a bit different, not as representational, and not covering the whole envelope.


Ruud Janssen, 5 of 17 (24 Mar 2005)
Inside the envelope Ruud includes a stiff sheet of paper entitled "Repetition." One bit of text appears three times on this page:

Some mail-artists seem to be doing the same things year after year.

I think Ruud's figured me out!

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Object Becomes Subject

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen created a small scrap collage on two sides of a postcard, but he made it a little different that usual. He inserted my little fidgetglyph "ObJecT" in the collage as well. The glyph is half-obscured, but clearly evident, even under the tape he uses to hold the pieces down.


Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, "peck decal bisect wreck recess" (Mar 2005)
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Not Writing, but Drawing

Have I lost, I wonder, all control over my life?

(Okay, an exaggeration.)

I discovered today a large envelope from Reed Altemus that contained a folder that held the seven photocopies that made up the collection, Two Copy Art Series. I'm impressed by the simple abstract beauty that Reed can capture on the white rag paper pages in this collection. And here's just a sample.


Reed Altemus, from Two Copy Art Series (2001)
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A Veil of You (or U)

Reed Altemus, "A U" (16 Mar 2005)
Reed Altemus sent me, on 16 March 2005, a simple found card, upon the face of which he has created a stylish scrap collage. I keep trying to read the text, using the hole in the pasted-down card as an O, reading the embossed R, trying to determine the letter-shapes the paper scraps have bee torn into.

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Alas, Biafra

R.F. Côté is a mailartist of prodigious imagination, sending me card after card that resembles the others only tangentially. This card opens with a gentle dreamy front. A single 55-cent stamp, and its surrounding border, take up more than half the side of the card


R.F. Côté, Obverse of Number 10 of 18 (13 Mar 2005)
The back, however, is another story.Upon a textured and painted surface, there sits a deflated plastic bubble, yellow-orange in color so that it obscures the image it ostensibly protects. If we push the bubble around, we can detect a few thin black African boys, apparently thin, and the sadness of their faces and the deflated and stomachlike bubble remind me of my memories of pictures of the Biafran 1960s.


R.F. Côté, Reverse of Number 10 of 18 (13 March 2005)
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The Long Trip to the Present

I have spent a good part of the day trying to catch up with this blog, not planning to catch up, just hoping to make a dent. Over the course of the afternoon and evening, I added seven entries about mailart received (all dated today), six entries about mailart sent (each dated the date of the original sending but currently without illustration, which I'll add later), and one entry explaining what I've done (this one). All fourteen of these entries appear on the top webpage of this blog as of 1 May 2005, but as soon as I add an entry later than today, the pages will begin to slip into the lower pages and out of sight.

So if you want to catch up yourself and want to do it in the easiest way possible, do it soon. By the way any entry after April 4th, I added today.

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Roy Dances to Music without Sound

As he is wont to do, Roy Arenella responds to a dbqp blog entry of mine with one of his photocards. The front of the card consists of a labeled photogram, "The Visualist Mind Dances Best to Anechoic Music." On the back of the card, Roy includes one of his insightful micro-essays in further response.

The back of the card also includes further support to the entire enterprise with the usual Arenellan maximaphily: His pseudo-cancellation stamp includes a rubberstamping of a dancing teenage boy, and one of the stamps he chooses is a 13-center illustrating American folk dancing. Roy has numbered this card # 70 p/c: the seventieth card of the year, and a photocard.


Roy Arenella, "The Visualist Mind Dances Best to Anechoic Music" (1 Sep 2003 and 15 Mar 2005)
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The Pataphysician Writes

Reed Altemus sent me a sheet of pataphysical postage stamps, which you can see peeking out of this envelope


Reed Altemus, "Postes Pataphysique" (Mar 2005)
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The Fruits of Spring

To celebrate the arrival of spring, Mick Boyle has sent a number of different types of radishes to his mailart correspondents. (See, for instance, Ruud Janssen's IUOMA.) Mine was this simple and stylish drawing:


Mick Boyle, "Radishes of Spring" (21 Mar 2005)
With the arrival of this card, there appeared the brief flowering of my garden's sole crocus.

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Lizard-Bird-Dragon-Marmoset

From Jassy Lupa, there arrived in my mailbox last March another wonderful card. On one side of the card is this image of a neo-post-Victorian man, a Phillipine stamp illustrated with a marmoset, and some gene-spliced beast that appears something akin to a bird with talons for horns.


Jassy Lupa, Talon-Horned Birds (21 Mar 2005)
On the reverse, she includes one of her detailed carving prints and a brief note. Both sides hold together (image, carving, postage stamp, and pseudo-cancellation mark) as one.

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The Size of Visual Poetry

Mick Boyle sent me, via email, a tiny little visual poem that seems to be about itself. Or maybe not.


Mick Boyle, "Estrangement at the seventh precipice" (12 Mar 2005)
But think about it. The poem seems to read 7kb, the possible size of a small textual image. At the very least, it is an example of the steady use of the printer's fist. Mick, being a designer, has a good grasp on this skill.

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Japanese Mail from Holland

So here's the deal: Last March, Ruud Janssen carried out an experiment. He put Japanese postage on correspondence and posted the mail (presumably in the Netherlands). He wanted to see if the mail would make it through to his correspondents, and it did. In my case, this mail (postmarked) 11 March 2005 (or, more precisely, "11. III. 05-22") arrived last March, without any indication of the sender.


Ruud Janssen, "Today is almost gone" (12 Apr 1996)
Inside, however, I found a note from Ruud and a couple of pieces of paper, including this interesting little visual essay, which I find a bit more wistful and delicate than most mailart.

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Vial Sounds

On March 7th, almost two months ago now, Nadja Sayej mailed me a small package that held the following vials filled with music.


Nadja Sayej, "Eight Notes Sang into Bottles," with Explanation (March 2005)
Also included in the package was a sheet explaining her techniques:

A B C D E F G. Alinear alphabet, the vocabulary of music. How can infinite sounds be produced from such a limited palette? Each not captured in time (recorded or not) is a unique statment [sic] in time.

This is a wonderful conceptual piece, each vial holding the remains of a note Nadja had sung into it.

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