Contributed by Liz Scheer / On Harmonious Regulations, released on Bandcamp on January 6, Bronx-based poet and musician Conor Gannon interlaces disparate mediums and genres to develop what he terms “tone poetry,” which uses electronic music to establish and maintain meter. Born of Gannon’s preoccupation with the shapes of audio waves, his tone poems have a sculptural quality in their use of sample-based repetition to structure metered verse. The album conveys vacillations of mood, from the cavernous distress of “Afterpoisoning” to the blasted wonder of “The Bread of Time,” which intones:
and yet there is such a beauty in the mortal time
that it is not clear any would choose another sort
The rigor and openness of Gannon’s poetry contrasts with the tightness of the musical score, tumbling around ambient sound progressions to underline the musical quality of words and, in turn, the syllabic quality of music. In pairing repeating sound progressions with “old-school” scansion, Gannon positions himself in a strain of modernist aesthetics that might be described as austere. Like the Latin word for “severity” from which it is derived, “austere” connotes a kind of asceticism: the constricted space and spartan walls of a monk’s chamber, in which layered sequences of sound might echo beyond space or time.
In the context of modern art, “austerity” most readily connotes the sensibility of Minimalists like Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, whose identical modules and hollow boxes, respectively, seem to disavow personal expression through their narrative sparseness: they betray no story or emotion. Gannon’s austerity offers a more narrative kind of self-negation. Harmonious Regulations tells the story of an anonymous “soul.” There are no pronouns in the album’s lyrics, no recognizable markers of time or place. These omissions produce a muted expressiveness reminiscent of modernist poets like John Berryman or Wallace Stevens.
Like Stevens, who uses cryptic images and made-up characters to make glacial admissions about his own interior life, Gannon eschews the narrative “I” in favor of a cryptic sentence structure where elements “collaborate” like the workings of a single mind:
the light collaborates more every day
constructing grandeur by way of eyes
worship with hands out of doors
gild the frame of earthen cathedral
everything nestled into a proper place
Lilting cadences and uncanny half-rhymes (eyes with doors, day with place) hold the work’s emotional intensity taut, giving the album the bewitching impenetrability of an ancient rune.
A visual correlative to Harmonious Regulations might be found somewhere between a medieval icon and a Jasper Johns painting, since both demonstrate the self-negation afforded by repetition. This melding of Christianity and modern abstraction seems connected to Gannon’s creative vision. His album narrates a soul’s volatile journey through life, and the metrical economy of the verse seems to impart that soul’s harmonization and regulation. In “And Completely to God,” the album’s final and most jubilant track, scales and percussion coalesce into swelling empathy. It is perhaps appropriate that the album shares its release date with the anniversary of the storming of the Capitol, as it reminds us to cherish traditional forms as bases for new modes of improvisation and surprise.
Conor Gannon, Harmonious Regulations. Listen at: https://conorgannon.bandcamp.com/harmonious-regulations
About the author: Elizabeth Scheer is a painter and writer living in New York. Follow her on Instagram at @liz_scheer_
