Killdeer Booklet

KILLDEER

Nick Flynn’s memoirs incorporate poetry , digression, fragmented narratives, and magical realism while his poetry, bracing and immediate, can be conversational in tone. Flynn thrives under such conditions of strategic ambiguity. What was the event, what was the experience, and what are the psychological reverberations are all juxtaposed, via collage-like structures in his work.

In a way, the convergence of the performers in this album is a collage. Composer and sound artist Guy Barash had been the constant, the gluon, who brought the personnel together. Through happenstance, Barash met fellow guitarist Eyal Maoz and trumpetist Frank London, John Zorn collaborators and new Jewish music scene standouts. They became the EFG Trio. Barash has had a long working relationship with new music piano superstar Kathleen Supové, performing as a duo under the name Guy and Doll.

Barash and Flynn have been fruitful collaborators for some time. Barash reached out to Flynn after encountering his writing in an anthology: “It was surprisingly subtle,” he describes the experience

of first discovering Flynn’s poetry, “like a riddle, and its rhythm was music to my ears.” In particular, Flynn’s frequent theme of the inheritability of trauma and addiction caught Barash’s attention. Killdeer is their spoken word and electronics project; through its various iterations, Flynn fleshed out his volume of poetry, I Will Destroy You.

The varied components of the quintet had not worked together until a week before this session. They had no prior expectations, no history with which to anticipate each other’s gestures and contributions; they could only react intuitively to the sound events around them. The text served as a score, Barash highlighting certain phrases and marking sections graphically to indicate organization of material and texture. All these disparate but related acts came together almost serendipitously. The results are spontaneous, individual yet familiar, jagged - even violent - yet intimate, improvised yet structured. A session defined by contradiction and ambiguity, of moving on after trauma. A reflection of ourselves and of our times.

— Seth Gilman

KILLDEER

Nick Flynn

You know how it pretends to have a broken wing to lure predators away from its nest, how it staggers just out of reach? If, at this moment, you’re feeling metaphorical, nest can be the whatever inside us that we think needs protection, the whatever that is small & hasn’t yet found its way. Like us it has lived so long on scraps, on what others have left behind, it thinks it could live on air, on words, forever almost, it thinks it would be better to let the predator kill it than to turn its back on that child again, forgetting that one lives inside the other.

Copyright © 2018 by Nick Flynn. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

“A risk-taker, willing to pull ideas from all disciplines as he jumps into the unknown” (icareifyoulisten.com), Guy Barash commonly applies electronic processing to acoustic instruments and employs microtonality to create psychologically disorienting atmospheres. His series of compositions for solo instruments and real-time digital signal processing, “Talkback,” was hailed as being “at once divine, serene and haunting” (The Queens Chronicle). Developing innovative, multidisciplinary projects, Barash collaborates with an array of poets, video-artists, musicians and choreographers. His collaboration with Nick Flynn has produced a number of provocative works, Proteus, Blind Huber, and Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins. Barash’s music has been heard in Belgium, London, Japan, and Israel, as well as at New York’s The Stone, La MaMa Theatre, and National Sawdust. guybarash.com

Nick Flynn has published twelve books, most recently This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (W. W. Norton & Co., 2020), a hybrid memoir; and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (ZE Books, 2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (Graywolf Press, 2019). He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston. His acclaimed memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), was made into a film starring Robert De Niro, and has been translated into fifteen languages. nickflynn.org

Left to right: Eyal Maoz, Frank London, Kathleen Supové, Nick Flynn, and Guy Barash at Dubway Studios, New York City (Photo by Gili Getz)

Grammy-award winning trumpeter Frank London is “the mystical high priest of New Wave Avant-Klez jazz.” (All About Jazz) London’s projects include the folk-opera A Night in the Old Marketplace, Davenen for Pilobolus and the Klezmatics, Great Small Works' The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, and Min Tanaka's Romance. He composed music for John Sayles' The Brother from Annother Planet and Men with Guns, Yvonne Rainer's Murder and Murder, the CzechAmerican Marionette Theater’s Golem and Tamar Rogoff's Ivye Project. He has worked with John Zorn, Karen O, Itzhak Perlman, Pink Floyd, LL Cool J, Mel Tormé, Lester Bowie, LaMonte Young, They Might Be Giants, David Byrne, Jane Siberry, and Ben Folds 5; is on over 500 CDs; and was featured on Sex and The City. franklondon.com

Kathleen Supové is one of America’s most acclaimed and versatile contemporary music pianists, known for continually redefining what a pianist/keyboardist/performance artist is in today’s world. A striking presence onstage, she has performed with computers, boxing gloves, robots, and laptop orchestra. Ms. Supové presents solo concerts under the moniker The Exploding Piano, presenting the most compelling new music along with electronics, video, theatrical elements, visuals, speaking, and even choreography.

Eyal Maoz is a composer, guitarist, and bandleader. He leads a number of original music ensembles including Edom (MiddleEastern meets pop and Downtown music) Wild Type (Slavic music meets jazz and experimental) and Dimyon (acoustic modern Jewish). Maoz’s music oscillates between extremely delicate and highly volatile. His work evokes the extravaganza of cutting edge experimentalism and chamber music grace, integrating rock, jazz and avant-garde, tinged with electronic and radical Jewish-MiddleEastern sound. Maoz is described by John Zorn, the influential modern composer and MacArthur genius award recipient, as “a vital member of the New York downtown scene.” “Maoz redefines what ethnocentric world fusion can be from a mean-streets New York City perspective.” (All Music Guide) eyalmaozmusic.com

“What Ms. Supové is really exploding is the piano recital as we have known it, a mission more radical and arguably more needed” (Anthony Tommasini, New York Times). She has received the John Cage Award from ASCAP for “the artistry and passion with which she performs, commissions, records, and champions the music of our time.” supove.com

Recorded on May 10, 2022 by Nico Pagni at Dubway Studios, New York City

Produced by Guy Barash

Mixed by Marc Urselli at EastSide Sound Mastered by Scott Hull at Masterdisk

Cover Art, Untitled, Ink on Paper, by Amnon Yuhas Design: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com

Music published by Barash Music (ASCAP) Poetry published by Graywolf Press

℗ & © 2023 Guy Barash & Nick Flynn

For Isha