To reF.M.R.L. is to scream
 … I no longer consider myself a writer, a theorist, a critic: rather, I am a handler of words, a listener, a reader.…
Daniela Cascella has opened her book outward in a series of re-mix opportunities to a limited number of artists/musicians/performers/listeners/thinkers. In doing so, reF.M.R.L. re-reads itself, perhaps re-hears, as well. The book as raw material tests the conventional reception to the author’s work to re-form the book as material presence and to enhance the many voices that inhabit and shape it. Savor and select one word each from the list at the beginning of F.M.R.L. Then recombine:
False Starts; Margins; Residues; Listen. A usual reading habit of scribbling in the margins is encouraged by Cascella’s text. What happens if you focus on the body … does she navigate this theme? (Keep scribbling.) Thus, a constant recognition—reading, scribbling, listening—to hone in on the physicality and sonics of dreams and to witness how these ephemeral narratives re-conjure mind and body in a space of ‘otherness.’ Despite Cascella’s landscapes of re-told dreams, they are mostly silent. Writer Anne Carson says dreams distort sound for they send it over many waters. … To write sounds does not mean to document them, to preserve them as intact entities, but to contribute to their decay, at times to be pervaded by a sense for something that may have not been: to write a history of dissolving and dying, a tanatography. …
What then is the writer’s task in relation not only to sound, but to a relationship of how sound diffuses and emanates from, within, around the body and its breath, its breathy vocalizations?
To scream is to re-mix My own re-mix arrived as an uncanny explosion of vocals that recently poured through me. Screams, unlike any timbre I’d ever articulated, were unleashed during a heated argument. A roar from the gut. A power of breath and voice—sheer vocalizing—were simultaneously unleashed. I could have screamed far longer than I did. I also could have slammed doors many more times for the delicious satisfaction. Reverberations in both body and space sounded in waves and amidst this circularity was a grounding. In the days following, I returned to ‘hear’ this body’s vocalization, this slam of a door into its frame. My listening was not ephemeral, then. My initial question to Daniela Cascella: could there be a scream in F.M.R.L.? … to record is partly a mourning, partly a repetition that brings back to heart, mind, soul. Any permanence, eroded in its mourning. To record in words is not about keeping, but about sounding a vanishing. Alive, and against any evidence …
Wired in sound: a conversation Listen to Daniela Cascella and Earlid’s Joan Schuman
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