released October 23, 2018

A THOUSAND HERTZ

I wrote the text for “A Thousand Hertz” in July of 2012, a few months following a sudden and inexplicable loss of hearing in my left ear.


Did I hit the wall too hard,
plunge too far beneath,
shake the membrane loose,
or break the myelin sheath?
Can I blame the electronics,
a strange, aquatic virus.
a dearth of potassium?
No one seems to know.

At night, when I hear ringing,
I can still convince myself,
random hair cells have resounded
at a thousand hertz and below.
Yet, even then, I fear the way
they merely say goodbye,
vibrating in sympathy, short
seconds before they die.




HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL

On December 26, 1997, my family and I visited the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston. The following day, I wrote this poem. Designed by Stanley Saitowitz, the New England Holocaust Memorial consists of six, fifty-four-foot high towers. Each tower is constructed of twenty-two glass panels, and each panel has thousands of seven-digit numbers etched into it. The overwhelming collective impact of these numbers epitomizes the incalculable human toll of the Holocaust.


Like a number
etched in plexiglass.

Like a number
sewn into skin.

Like an ember
glowing in a furnace.

Like the woman
who never bore a child.

Like the child
who never grew to manhood.

Like the man
who might have learned the secret.

Of the virus
that afflicts the young body.

Of the child
whose father slaughtered millions.

Like the father
who watched his child dying.

From the virus
that shut the gates of Heaven.




LATE NIGHT OCEAN DUMPING

This piece began as a poem that I wrote in August of 1991, after reading an article that appeared in the Boston Globe earlier that week. This article reported on a rather disturbing waste-disposal practice that was authorized by the state of Massachusetts between the 1940’s and the 1970’s. This practice utilized WWII-era military ships that had been refitted to function as “garbage barges.” Under cover of darkness, these ships routinely transported all manner of rubbish to an area near Stellwagen Bank in Massachusetts Bay, where it was indiscriminately dumped.


Coursing through the North Atlantic,
the fish are dispersed by
the subsonic tremor of
the garbage barge as it
enervates their spawn
with phosphorescent waste.

Myriad microcosms lost in an instant.
The echoes of death
reach all of their brethren.
When nets are full of chunky poison,
we shall soon taste it.




PATRIPASSIAN

In the summer of 2016, CCRMA PhD candidate, Alex Chechile kindly asked me to collaborate with him on this rendition of “Patripassian,” by Nick Cave and Current 93. An austerely minimalistic piece for electronic sound and spoken word, “Patripassian” features excerpts from Blaise Pascal's The Pensées, which reference the Biblical account of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Alex and I had performed this piece several years prior at a mixed-media concert in Brooklyn, New York, and thus, he had already digitized and processed the haunting formant soundscape. Per his request, I overdubbed a spoken word track at my home studio in South Portland, Maine. Alex’s pacing of the piece underscores the stark imagery of the text, and Pascal's depiction of solitary suffering. This deliberate pacing challenges me to be patient with my recitation of the text.


The rivers of Babylon flow
And fall
And carry away

Jesus is alone on earth
Not merely with no one to feel and share His agony
But with no one even to know of it
Heaven and he are the only ones to know

Jesus is in a garden
Not of delight
Like the first Adam
Who there fell and took with him all mankind
But of agony
Where He has saved Himself and all mankind

He suffers this anguish and abandonment in the horror of the night

Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world
There must be no resting in the meantime


Alex Chechile................ music
Lee Todd Lacks............. voice




CICADA CHORUS

The ominous atmospheric sounds were generated by a freeware application called Coagula. Developed by Rasmus Ekman, Coagula enables the user to convert a bitmap image file (bmp) to a wave audio file (wav). When rendering an image, the vertical position of each pixel determines the frequency of the corresponding sound, while its horizontal position determines the sound’s occurrence in time.




MARIE

“Marie” is an ode to Maria Sklodowska Curie, the pioneering chemist and physicist who, in collaboration with her husband, Pierre, discovered the existence of radium and polonium. Madame Curie was the first woman ever to teach at the Sorbonne, and she is the only person ever to receive Nobel Prizes in two different fields of science. Pierre Curie was tragically killed on April 19, 1906, when he was struck by a horse-drawn cart while attempting to cross a busy street in Paris.


Enchanting…
Daughters of stardust
Beckon us towards their fragile future.
Can you see it?
A wondrous light for none to keep.
Will we bear witness till
our blood glows heavy?

Yes, once we reduce
rare earth to essence,
Apocalypse whispers in our pockets.
Can you hear it?

This whisper put an end to the war.
This whisper put an end to the world.

The century dawns so bright.
Why deplete ourselves in vain pursuit?
We can delve beyond the flesh,
to the bone, to the marrow,
to the clockwork of stars!

Must you leave so soon, my love?
Agendas and wayward carts might
rend you from my life,
but I swear, they shall not
rend me from our work!

I’ll catch infinitesimal traces
of unearthly power,
blessings that can’t be counted till
our thrill numbs our dread,
curses that can’t be lifted till
every half-life’s spent and
nothing’s left but lead!

Listen...

This whisper put an end to the war.
This whisper put an end to the world.
This whisper put an end to me.

Heather Kane Lacks,....... voice
Tom Swafford.................. violin




STARBREAKER

This poem refers to my experience of living with significant vision and hearing deficits, and my compulsion to present like a typically-abled person.


My left eye and my right ear,
monaural and monocular.
That's all I got, and
that's not enough.

I still go out, though
I can't seem to keep the
world from disappearing,
wear my hood up all the
way for fear of seeming lost.

Can't break down my Hoover cane since
the bungee cords snapped months ago,
like a misfit wizard's staff dispelling
specters of low mobility, harnessing
powers I shouldn't have to split
the ground beneath them.

In this closed circuit of a
neighborhood, all my relations
feel scripted for their protection.
They can never tell how much
I glean without hearing.

I'm a cautionary tale.

No one gets to know.

Don't ask me who they voted for.

Don't tell me there's a storm comin'.

Don't be afraid of the dark, love.

I know the way.




THE WILD BOAR OF NORMANDY

“The Wild Boar of Normandy” is based upon my experience of visiting the Omaha Beach War Memorial with my family in the summer of 1994. This story, which is entirely true right up until the point at which I first mention the elderly gentleman, was written two years later. The music for this track was recorded in March of 2006, and features a sound that I created by circuit-bending my Casio SK-1. When people ask me to define circuit-bending, I tell them that it’s very much like discovering several previously-unexplored rooms in your own home. Through this process, long-neglected noise toys such as Casio’s SK-1, Texas Instruments’ Speak ‘n’ Spell, and Milton Bradley’s Simon are purposefully short-circuited in order to produce startling sonic results. My SK-1 was modified by a gifted software engineer named John Staskevich, who designs and installs a wide variety of retrofit kits for consumer- and professional-grade electronics. When I informed John that my low vision might prohibit me from working with the light gauge wires that he typically included with his circuit-bending kits, he graciously offered to design a custom patchbay system that could be operated with banana cables, which were considerably more substantial than the wires.


In the summer of 1994, my family and I traveled to France. While there, we visited the World War II memorial at Omaha Beach. The Omaha Beach war memorial consists of a large cemetery, where the Allied soldiers who fought and died in the Battle of Normandy have been laid to rest. If you visit the site, you can see the beach from the top of a steep hill, which overlooks the English Channel. Visitors are permitted to walk down to the beach. There is a narrow footpath, which winds down the hill and eventually falls away in to the sea. The hill is covered with a variety of thick shoreline vegetation: weeds and grasses, shrubs and mosses.

My brothers and I were interested in walking down to the beach, and so we looked to see where the footpath began. We followed a stone wall, which ran along the top of the hill, until we came to a gate. The gate was unlocked, however, fastened to it was a small sign which read in French, German, and English: “BEWARE OF WILD BOAR.” We found this sign to be most peculiar. On the one hand, we couldn’t understand why a wild boar would choose to roam in an area which attracted such a large tourist population. On the other hand, we couldn’t understand why the French government would allow a wild boar to run loose on the grounds of the one of the nation’s most revered historical sites.

As we stood in front of the gate, staring at the sign, a young boy came up behind us, clutching the hand of an elderly gentleman, who appeared to be the boy’s grandfather. Noticing the sign, the boy turned to his grandfather and said something in French. His grandfather responded in a voice which, to me, sounded quite solemn. I do not speak French, but my brother, Derek, is fluent in the language. My brothers and I let the boy and his grandfather go ahead of us, and after they had gone beyond hearing distance, I turned to Derek and asked, “What were they talking about?” My brother paused for a moment, appearing to be somewhat astonished. Finally, he began to explain.

“The boy had asked his grandfather about the boar. Now, I may have misunderstood, but I thought I heard the old man say that the boar has roamed this hill for the past fifty years, hunting the ghosts of the Nazi soldiers who died here. The spirits of the Nazis have been condemned to this place. They are seen only by the boar, which relentlessly pursues them for all eternity. No one has ever seen the boar, but many have heard it on dark, moonless nights, screaming its message of divine retribution: that all those who in life were consumed with hatred are now and forever consumed by it.”




Lee Todd Lacks seeks to blur the distinctions between rants,
chants, anecdotes, and anthems by incorporating spoken word with experimental music. He has performed as a soloist and as a member of various ensembles at venues throughout the United States, including Mobius (Boston), Roulette (NYC), The Music Mansion (Providence), The First Banana (Philadelphia), Gallery 1412 (Seattle), and Berkeley Art Center (Berkeley, CA). His writing and artwork have been published in The Monarch Review, The Quarterday Review, Crack The Spine Anthology, Bop Dead City, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Liquid Imagination, and elsewhere. In May of 2017, he presented selections of his poetry at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) in collaboration with a group of multimedia artists from the United States and Romania.