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Blowing One’s Own Bone, or
Truth Shot Through Me Like a Whistle, She Said

Margaret De Wys composition “I OH [I have a magnetic shadow / bleeding on tape /as an echo] has been issued on Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label, and my piece below was written as accompanying text. The context of her composition is quite important to know both in listening to the CD and in reading my remarks below. The composer writes:

This composition developed as a music-centered response to my personal work with ‘liminal states of consciousness’ that arose in a non-art context generally characterized as healing. Based on casual recordings of my own voice that I made during actual sessions, my soundtrack focuses on sequences of highly stimulated vocalization (‘excited,’ ‘ecstatic,’ etc.), particularly those that seem to embody a unique and intense experience of knowing, something like a direct encounter with vitality. The effects: sound, vision and emotion in the rawest possible state. Truth shot through me like a whistle.

The unaccompanied, minimally edited voice is, as she says, raw, embodying the emotional/psychic state that drives it; completely unselfconscious and without the slightest trace of musical training in evidence or any sort of affective enhancement. If you heard these sounds out of the blue, your perhaps anxious effort to interpret what it is you are hearing might range from someone is giving birth, reaching orgasm, or undergoing catharsis to embodying spirits, expelling demons, expressing rage or dying…. This, of course, is the work of a highly accomplished composer with an impressive, complex, and innovative body of work. [As published in