Like the eye, the ear doesn't blink
The Archive of Charlie Morrow
ISBN 9781736690253
Paperback 4.5 x 7", 288 pages
$30
The collected archive of Charlie Morrow, renowned composer and culturalist, as described through his career of collaboration and performance. A timeline of cultural events and social change, this book serves as a memoir of both the development of sound as a stand alone field of art and the application of concurrent influences in language, multiculturalism and literature. Morrow reminds us that any true expression is necessarily a reflection of our times, not merely a mirror to ourselves.
"Part flip book, part catalogue raisonné, and part autobiography, Like the eye, the ear doesn’t blink is, finally, a work of conceptual art chock full of collaboration, invention, and novel ways to conceive the relation of sound, music, words, and ideas." Charles Bernstein
"After years – decades in fact – of following Morrow's works and often composing by his side, I've been awed again and again by the amazing range of his interests and doings: the technical genius on the one hand and his delving beyond that into the deeply rooted ethnopoetic and more: the possibilities of music and meaning throughout the sounding and sentient world. In that sense, Like the eye, the ear doesn't blink is not only an archive and a testament but a work of art in itself: an artist's book and a joy to have and to hold." Jerome Rothenberg
"Like the eye, the Ear doesn’t blink is a book like no other. It includes the up-to-date contents of the archival catalogue of avant-garde soundist Charlie Morrow. Morrow has worked on the cusp & edge of many movements, collaborated with many of the greats in art & sound & this book of lists, serves as a public record, a coming clean, a reckoning of Morrow’s production over a period of 60+ years. Lists (& bibliographies) are, indeed, a kind of biography, but also a kind of poetry, as I suggested in my book LIST FULL: List Poems of Necessary Orderliness, able to illuminate beyond the presumptions of a list’s limitations. This archival record gains further sustenance & resonance as a result of the brilliant graphic design by goats & compasses. The design suggests a book beyond page turning, with the print floating off the shadow-embellished pages, freed of the constraints of a conventional book containing a conventional narrative with conventional words to ultimately engage with its surroundings.
It is also an art object, a beautiful thing to hold & behold, that serves as one part musical score of an artist’s yearnings, another part seismographic map of the heart, the graphic EKG output of a life devoted to art & it’s comprehension, & as a geographic-topographic map that depicts Morrow’s site-specific, or rather site-engaging, art that has found him in dialogue with far-flung locations, many in the harsh far north. where the list on every page has to negotiate or interact with the floating symbols of our language disconnected letters that float about on a page cast with shadows. I’m enchanted every time I hold & flip through Like the Eye, imagining a surrealist may have blown fairy dust into the pages to transmute it into something far greater than a book you place on a shelf." bart plantengna
