Portrait
What the Bluffs Returned
A portrait set along the Mississippi bluffs. The land remembering what the people forgot. Iron Range soil, real science, invented life.
Read portraitA portrait set along the Mississippi bluffs. The land remembering what the people forgot. Iron Range soil, real science, invented life.
Read portrait342 lines. The longest single piece in the prayer collection. Shelter that doesn't ask permission.
Field recordings, composition. The thing you hear before you understand what you're hearing.
5×7 saddle-stitch. Black ink only. Objects you hold. The material decides where it wants to go.
Human and other natures. The practice's first real-time composed piece — ten fragments shaped across a single session. Wonderful Garbage in motion.
Read piece22 chapters. Feldkirch to Collioure to Pigalle. A story that moves the way memory does — not forward, but in circles that tighten.
Ten puppets, one stage, no exits. Underground theater beneath Malheur National Forest. The light comes through damage.
The people who were there. Their scenes are the foundation of the entire practice. The land opened over millennia and their stories came out.
Meet the witnessesThe most intimate practice in the most open space. A bedroom with no enclosure. A dry creek is still a creek — the path is cut even when the water isn't running. Five registers: Domestic Warmth, Noir Chanson, Sound Writing, Process Record, Raw Material. The language decides which voice it needs.
Everything we make comes from what got thrown away. Warning labels peeled off bottles. Voice memos transcribed at 2 a.m. Product packaging language. Discarded phrases overheard in grocery stores. The practice is a refusal to let those things stay discarded. You don't enter through the front door — you find the hole in the wall.
26 parts. The practice telling its own story — from the first fragment to the finished building. Not a memoir. A map drawn while walking. A canyon basin holds everything that flows into it. Some of it evaporates. Some of it cuts the rock deeper.
Ten pieces that open the doors into everything else. Boulders deposited by the glacier of the whole practice — each one stable, each one an opening downward. Start anywhere. Each one leads deeper. The sinkhole is the invitation.
Marie, Herb, Nell, Jean, Hahnu Youn. The people who were there. The land opened over millennia and their scenes came out. The bluff is the mouth — what it says took ten thousand years to form and will outlast everyone who hears it.
A collaborative novel. Four voices in conversation — B W Otto, Clod Hopper, Reach Chimes, Keren Simone. Blinding surface, extracted depth, the darkness where the voices actually meet. Coffee-shop register. No singular self. Always we.
The eruption already happened. What's left is the shape of it — grooved, marked, gorgeous. No single medium owns the practice. Visual art, assemblage, booklets, installations, performance. The material decides where it wants to go. The caldera holds the evidence.
A fjord carved by ancient force. The tool is the nerd door. The face is the portrait. The landing is where you finally arrive at the person after the deep passage in. 55 fictional portraits built on real science, set on real land, written in Noir Song voice. Iron Range to Braddock to Brunswick to Provence. Plus 7+ real Musicological Witness portraits.
Something was natural. Then someone built on it. Then it was ruined, or softened by time. And now it shelters anyway. 80+ prayers accumulated over six months. Day-named prayers, the Fabulous Friday five-prayer system, the Master Prayer at 342 lines. The outsider's architecture — shelter that doesn't ask permission.
Coastal, tidal, ancient, fortified by something alive long before you arrived. Twenty-two chapters. Troll Tearsen, Walter Heindl, the marble. Feldkirch to Collioure to Pigalle. A story that moves the way memory does — not forward, but in circles that tighten.
Underground theater beneath Malheur National Forest. What was permanent became temporary. What was fortified cracked. The light comes through damage — and sometimes the light is funny. Ten characters with construction specifications. Céleste, Emma, Olivier, Maud, Privat, Keren, Peder, Alela, Jun, Lizz. Three plays. No exits.
Everything preserved in peat survives — the body, the instrument, the frequency. Notes at the precipice. Field recordings, composition, the space between noise and listening. Noir Song Frequencies is the practice's sonic arm — the thing you hear before you understand what you're hearing.
Flat elevated ground with a carved channel running through it. Dispatches from the practice, channeled outward. Not a blog. Not a newsletter. A broadcast — something sent from a fixed point with no certainty about who's receiving.
The mouth of the place that used to grow things in the dark. The complete inventory. Every piece that passed through the practice — organized by category, searchable, alive. Not a trophy case. A working record. Where raw material enters and finished work is filed. 1,033 pieces and counting.
Tilted. Part chance, part cultivation. The slot machine is on its side — the odds are broken. The garden plot is real — something is actually growing. Current work in improbable soil. What the practice is making right now, today, this week.
The single bare bulb left on in an empty theater so the ghosts can perform. The signal that keeps transmitting when nobody's watching. Not a podcast. Not a channel. A wavelength — you tune into it or you don't. The rehearsal never stops. The loft is always lit.
Two voices, one narrow strip of shared ground, a drink on the table. The zone of enforced peace between two oceans. Demilitarized — neither voice conquers the other. The isthmus is the only place they both fit. The bar is where they actually talk.