[? Literalizing ?] his dozen tongues,
[INAUDIBLE] puts his words into the mouths of 12 reverends,
fathers, and Rabbis.
[INAUDIBLE OVERLAPPING VOICES]
They test the script.
Body test it is it.
In oration, like music, every listener is a participant.
Voice is primal magic, a sonic possession.
Do these holy men wonder what would
happen if they took Giuliani's icky religiosity
into their mouths.
Do they try to make it make meaning
instead of manipulation?
We are all walking this walk and out of breath,
leaking 30 seconds of dead language in a loop.
Just walking around, and looking about in the rain.
What are my words good at not knowing?
Across the street, listen.
Articulation does not mean that they need to talk for you.
It means being affected by others.
The moment when a feeling enters the body is political.
The body learns to register and become sensitive to the world.
Do you feel your heart racing yet?
The body is like a voice.
Once, it initiates the work of memory, it cannot stop.
What I hear you saying is--
[INAUDIBLE OVERLAPPING VOICES]
--we can't shut off the voices in our heads.
Walk yourself out of that fiction
staged as political discourse.
[INAUDIBLE OVERLAPPING VOICES]
To speak is to assert, and to ensure its existence.
But the opposite of embodied is dead, not a mission.
Everything you refuse to acknowledge you
know pools, reproduces, tutors our ears.
Grammatical convolutions of forced reciprocity
shove the despots and demigods down our ear-holes.
I
This exit leads us each time back to the entrance
from the current climate.
You can hear a gutter, drunk you first each time emptying
empty promises further.
How do we get out of here?
Over here, history has prediction,
has a cage trapping the future.
Let's not go back there.
Follow my footsteps.
Organize your cognition around rhythm for once.
Follow that rhythm until my world and your world mix.
If you adopt this new rhythm, it will take you
into another way of hearing.
[BELL RINGING IN DISTANCE]
Turn around let's go back to 1964.
I'll fill you in on the story when we get there.
[FOOTSTEPS]
15-year-old James Powell from Harlem
is on the Upper East Side when a cop shoots and kills him
the cop is cleared of charges.
But before that, before the long hot summer and the five days
of revolt in Harlem, earlier that spring,
some kids knock over a fruit stand.
Police chase and beat them.
Take out their guns.
Seeing this, several bystanders tried to intervene,
keeping the police from shooting.
The NYPD hauls the young Black man on the street that day
back to the station, arrest them for murder,
and severely beat them.
These Harlem six are sentenced to life.
The sentence goes on trial and retrial.
Takes a walk, it takes time.
Steve Reich culled this clip from 10 reel
to reel tapes of interviews with police.
We are still walking it out.
I had to-- if I open the bruise up, and let
some of the bruise blood come out to show them.
I had to, like, open the bruise up and let
some of the bruise blood come out to show them.
I had to like open the bruise up and let
some of the bruise blood come out to show them.
This is Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six
after the police refused him medical attention.
come out to show them-- come out to show them--
The sentence goes on trial, gets a rehearing.
The correct word, the signifying "bruise,"
comes out like "blues" or portmanteau "bluce."
Blues.
Bruise.
Bluce.
Bruise.
Blues.
Opens a historical wound to let the blues come out.
We lack the language to articulate,
to let the blues blood show them.
Let it out.
Fix it in our skulls, ritualistically.
You may fail to register the counter-questioning of those
you interrogate either because you are too distanced,
or because you are drowning them in your own empathy.
Daniel Hamm, age 19, is one of the bystanders
who tried to stop the cops from beating those kids.
Come on.
Walk this passage through to a new epistemology.
The vernacular model is what affect here yet,
Like Rauschenberg, who left his source material for collages
identifiable.
Reich keeps the timbre, pitch, unaltered.
[INAUDIBLE] offers a recursive documentary.
Are you walking with me?
Are you sweating yet?
Five of the Harlem Six were later committed.
[INAUDIBLE OVERLAPPING VOICES]
We who live here, know this, the productive repetition,
decoded in the slowdown, repeating riffs
with nuanced voice.
[DANIEL HAMM AUDIO DISTORTING]
--come out to show them, come out to show them,
come out to show them,
come out to show--
I hope it doesn't keep raining.
I want us to keep walking.
Just walking around and looking about in the rain.
Don't lose your [INAUDIBLE].
We just got started.
[DANIEL HAMM AUDIO REPEATING AND DISTORTING]
Let your whole body become amplified.
It's more like remembering the sound than really hearing it.
Voice cracking out of the voice and walking [INAUDIBLE]
first into the world, making a turn [INAUDIBLE]..
Notice turning into a kind of flu and Two looping channels,
slipping more and more out of sync.
The slip and catch stresses me out.
On my own I feel she'll come up and hopefully she'll
come home she'll come home after the show
To move ahead, there will have to be some structural changes.
There will have to be places to walk.
Four decades later, this ruin, a monument, a street.
A prison cell keeps replicating these walls,
its doubly arrested mind.
The street pours itself into the apparent "if"
Its monument can not be solved or saved.
[DANIEL HAMM AUDIO REPEATING AND DISTORTING]
Come out to the streets.
Come out with your hands in the air.
Come out, cop.
Walk slowly.
Show them your hands, mother fucker.
Show them you won't take it.
Here the force of existence splinters from the streets
and then right back out through the police megaphone.
Left channel, right channel.
Walking one foot in the future, one and the past.
Left, right.
Your body caught in a middle.
Life in the wrong place, wrong time.
caught in the running man theory.
You see a Black man running, you've got yourself a sentence.
[DANIEL HAMM AUDIO REPEATING AND DISTORTING]
We were walking into a trap.
Whoever hears this is guilty.
Enter a lived-in feeling.
You're walking into the sound of your own voice.
Why are you talking?
[DANIEL HAMM AUDIO REPEATING AND DISTORTING]
Resound and return that subject object.
The reverb is killing me.
I don't want to go on, but now we
are really getting somewhere.
Maybe you can take a break here, try to stop,
but the voice keeps shattering perspective.
Where in the room do I stand it?
I can no longer hear one voice, one time, one place.
This is a repeating story.
This is one voice and a riot shape shifting, just walking
around and looking about in the rain.
[INAUDIBLE] here for God's sake.
Move with the sound of the rhythm
becoming expressive into a body dissolved,
decomposing, projecting, extracting.
Resembance is not the only way to load words into the mind.
[DANIEL HAMM AUDIO REPEATING AND DISTORTING]
It is difficult not to disappear here.
You get carried away into the following refrain,
shift with the phrase relations, hold out your arms now
to walk its waves, appearance, disappearance,
taking over our body.
Vibrations slip in to channels two and four and eight
until the words are resurfaced synasthetic, slippery.
All the flavors are filterings all the hazards are on.
Street exhaust chokes us with regret.
I'm not here.
Moving.
[DANIEL HAMM AUDIO REPEATING AND DISTORTING]
Let the sounds move through you.
What I hear you saying is here is a [INAUDIBLE] Walking
is a machine that links hearing and time.
For a long time it was thought that language
had mastery over time, that it acted
both as the future bond of promise,
and memory and narrative.
It was thought to be prophecy and history.
Also it was [? sovereign, ?] but its essence
took the form of words or in a breath that made them vibrate.
The fact is only a formless rumbling, a streaming.
Its power lies in disintegration.
That is why it is one with the erosion of time,
to be doing time, to be out of sync.
to the end time or out, dividing like cells to intensify being,
to forming to generate [INAUDIBLE]
pulse, a phantasmagoric this is crisis time.
The sound of time working locked into the subjectivity
of unlocking details unavailable via hearing in real time.
Rhythm and tempo patterns immerse you.
reveal words [INAUDIBLE] sublime power of [INAUDIBLE]..
The words have been erased, effectively metabolized.
Hold on.
We're rushing ahead.
Catch your breath.
As listeners, we are bound to visit
each potential explanation.
To your right do you hear that another masculine effacement,
yet another violent, pulverizing of context and content.
All the words have been censored.
Have we walked into times real function?
To erase the known?
Reich liquefies language, but in doing so,
he lets us listen through the ears of the police state.
He warns us that danger
Far from the [INAUDIBLE].
Turn to your left.
Language can distance us.
just about anything can be ignored, misheard,
misunderstood.
By stripping speech and its native tendency to misrepresent
threat and [INAUDIBLE] deny.
[INAUDIBLE] denies.
Everything you refuse to acknowledge now that you know.
[DANIEL HAMM AUDIO REPEATING AND DISTORTING]
Hamm's voice [INAUDIBLE] the [INAUDIBLE]
just using machine, time machine,
walking machine meant to break him, meant to recondition us,
to rehabilitate a social life, meant
to meddle our outrage in refusing
to be reduced to outrage.
A refrain opens up to let out multitudes,
to let them pour out.
Let it pour out.
This language is indigestible.
Its rhythm innoculates.
Retune our ears.
Peripheral hearing dilates.
right in your left ear, right on to what refuses to be left out.
[DANIEL HAMM AUDIO REPEATING AND DISTORTING]
Have your ears adjusted yet?
The only future here is to hear such a specialized knowledge
resonate.
[DANIEL HAMM AUDIO REPEATING AND DISTORTING]
Whenever the world is accurately represented,
a voice and it's subjectivity are made redundant.
Words are scraped off the voice, but the voice cannot be
separated from the rest of the body.
The otherworldly sound of [? body ?] talk.
Where we were once walking through language,
we are now walking through total articulation.
If I ever [INAUDIBLE] impression that we are alone in the dark,
it is because this chorus does not seek [? covenants. ?]
You begin to imagine you are several.
You must continue as such.
Turn here, where voice swerves into electric [INAUDIBLE]
transforming into turbulence, knowing what not to know.
Stay with us.
If you want to know all the dialects, just ask.
Move on into perpetual consequences.
We are going all the way down.
I love these sounds.
[INAUDIBLE]
It's like suddenly realized you're
on the same street as a hooded man.
The guard told me I was crazy walking in the dark
alone like this.
But seeing him is more frightening than whatever
fantasy he imagined for me, just walking around moving about
in the rain.
You are reminded of another time.
To see or not see a Black man walking in your neighborhood.
You remember this, don't you?
We've had some break ins in the neighborhood,
and there's this real suspicious guy.
This guy looks like he's up to no good
or on drugs or something.
It's raining and he's just walking around looking about.
He looks Black wearing a dark hoodie.
And is it a male or a female?
It sounds like a male.
And you don't know why?
I don't know why I think they were [INAUDIBLE],,
but I don't know.
[INAUDIBLE] happened.
Is heard person I can't [INAUDIBLE]..
I want to go outside.
I want to know what's going on.
[INAUDIBLE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[INAUDIBLE] You just heard gunshots?
Yes.
How many?
Just one.
[FOOTSTEPS]
What does it mean to walk in this world?
Here we are on the other side, but this is not
a bridge I've chosen to walk.
You can open your eyes now.
[APPLAUSE]