Grasping at Emptiness
A video collage from 2023.
In some kind of mood the other afternoon I got stoned and started reading John Giorno’s ‘Grasping at Emptiness’ into my phone. For whatever reason when I listened back to the voice memo it put me in mind of a recording I’d made a couple of years before, during the pandemic, of a guitar solo on a scratched copy of Joni Mitchell’s Shadows and Light I’d found in a dollar bin.
I’d arrived at the rather harebrained conclusion back then, after it happened by accident a few times, that for each of the countless loops on the beat-up records in my collection there existed some other, apparently unrelated song somewhere that—if I managed to discover it and play it simultaneously on another device within earshot—would miraculously heal it. It was never predictable which other song would prove to be the remedy for which scratch, but it became a practice with me to jump up, whenever an LP I was listening to got stuck, and instead of lifting the needle into the next groove just let it play while I applied song after song to the injured record from my computer speakers.
For I’d come to think of the loops as being like hemorrhoids or senses of self: places where, because of some seemingly unreleasable wound, the movement of universal circulation starts to turn back over and over on itself instead of continuing along the spiral path laid out for it that leads back inexorably to the resting place it started from, outside the wheel. And I couldn’t avoid the feeling that it might be my responsibility, having taken in these broken records, to try to heal them.
Anyway, on the guitar solo in question—some extended noodling by Pat Metheny between ‘Amelia’ and ‘Hejira’—there were two separate lesions, and although it took me a while to find the right antidotes (I can’t remember anymore what they were, only that they were improbable in the extreme) both of them responded to treatment, the first fairly quickly but the second only after what felt like an eternity—and for once I had the turntable plugged into a recorder while I cast about for their specifics.
This proof of the miraculous cure I had effected sat forgotten on my computer for three years until listening to the voice memo I’d made of ‘Grasping at Emptiness’ I happened to think of it. Moved by the memory, I laid the two tracks on top of each other, stretched out the fucked-up guitar solo until it was precisely the same length as my recitation, and pressed play. Was I surprised by what I heard?—: at each moment Giorno’s words and Metheny’s guitar seemed to correspond, as though they’d been patterned after the same unknown hologram or time stamp. I realized I’d stumbled across a somewhat more recherché synchronicity of the Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon type.
So I made this video to go with it. It’s just a bedroom moodboard of things seen along the way.
In some kind of mood the other afternoon I got stoned and started reading John Giorno’s ‘Grasping at Emptiness’ into my phone. For whatever reason when I listened back to the voice memo it put me in mind of a recording I’d made a couple of years before, during the pandemic, of a guitar solo on a scratched copy of Joni Mitchell’s Shadows and Light I’d found in a dollar bin.
I’d arrived at the rather harebrained conclusion back then, after it happened by accident a few times, that for each of the countless loops on the beat-up records in my collection there existed some other, apparently unrelated song somewhere that—if I managed to discover it and play it simultaneously on another device within earshot—would miraculously heal it. It was never predictable which other song would prove to be the remedy for which scratch, but it became a practice with me to jump up, whenever an LP I was listening to got stuck, and instead of lifting the needle into the next groove just let it play while I applied song after song to the injured record from my computer speakers.
For I’d come to think of the loops as being like hemorrhoids or senses of self: places where, because of some seemingly unreleasable wound, the movement of universal circulation starts to turn back over and over on itself instead of continuing along the spiral path laid out for it that leads back inexorably to the resting place it started from, outside the wheel. And I couldn’t avoid the feeling that it might be my responsibility, having taken in these broken records, to try to heal them.
Anyway, on the guitar solo in question—some extended noodling by Pat Metheny between ‘Amelia’ and ‘Hejira’—there were two separate lesions, and although it took me a while to find the right antidotes (I can’t remember anymore what they were, only that they were improbable in the extreme) both of them responded to treatment, the first fairly quickly but the second only after what felt like an eternity—and for once I had the turntable plugged into a recorder while I cast about for their specifics.
This proof of the miraculous cure I had effected sat forgotten on my computer for three years until listening to the voice memo I’d made of ‘Grasping at Emptiness’ I happened to think of it. Moved by the memory, I laid the two tracks on top of each other, stretched out the fucked-up guitar solo until it was precisely the same length as my recitation, and pressed play. Was I surprised by what I heard?—: at each moment Giorno’s words and Metheny’s guitar seemed to correspond, as though they’d been patterned after the same unknown hologram or time stamp. I realized I’d stumbled across a somewhat more recherché synchronicity of the Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon type.
So I made this video to go with it. It’s just a bedroom moodboard of things seen along the way.