synopsis
This synopsis is as much an outline and summary account as it is a prologue and a departure point for reading into this work. The Sound Release of Glared Faust relates three moments in the life of Glared Faust partly retelling the story of the emblematic doctor Faust and party reprising to some extent a moment in the life of artist and poet Gerald Mayo, a black activist from Reading, PA, incarcerated in the 1970s and 1980s in the now abandoned old Western Penitentiary on the banks of the Ohio river in Pittsburgh. The piece takes place as an opera with no sung libretto but with text presented as intertitles projected on a screen on stage throughout the entire performance. A kind of “silent opera” for its initial outer shape, it is also silent and opera in that we look to expose ourselves to what operates in the process of recreating a story, abstract or concrete, in our minds and understanding, as we perceive certain elements bringing their materiality to full perception: music is not visible and seems to come from thin air, but only if its source is hidden—when musicians are palpable (in this Faust musicians at all times improvise in plain sight; the ensemble is reduced to 10 to 12) music is a concrete achievement. The text (because the piece is written) is not taken as a prompt to interpret, but as language to articulate. In short: The story is not enacted, the music doesn’t carry characters along, any image or idea we forge is not figured out first by a presence given, but by a silence that surrounds the making of every element involved.
The piece comprises two parts—it starts off as a narrative and ends as an allegory. Glared Faust is a young inmate confined to a state prison. Immerse in the tribulations of their hastily and unfair life, they conclude the responsibility over their distressed present situation is only to be blamed on Satan, whose deceiving has deprived them of their constitutional rights. They then resolve to sue Satan, for which they expound their reasons in written, request pro bono assistance, and file a legal complaint. The legal system won’t find it possible to dismiss the case by labeling it as absurd and instead states as its reason to dismiss it the failure of the plaintiff to provide with instructions for the court to deliver service of process. Defeated, Glared Faust contemplates again the futility of any action that could come from them and particularly of their ability of understanding others and the extent and purpose of anybody’s language. At this point they are visited by Satan, who offers them the ability to overcome that lack of understanding and being one with the meaning of all and everybody; in exchange they will let him in the system: the devil will give them an address for the lawsuit to take place and win – Glared will proceed and place Satan in the realm of the judge, the law, and ultimately of language.
Once Satan is brought in the system of law and language, his first and only decision is to erase the difference between tongues. As a consequence, all spoken languages become one across all speakers—either the differences between languages are erased or they remain but are not perceived—everything is turned into one only language. Everybody speaks/perceives the same flow of talk with certainty and in the same way. Understanding becomes an immediate intuitive capture, with no room for misunderstanding or ambiguity. With the lack of languages comes the lack of translation, and with this the lack of bringing foreign and unheard-of meaning to a given tongue by means of directly intervening and deviating the material continuum of speech sound. Undifferentiated speech proves to be no more and no less than anything. Both efficient and redundant, unbeatably nonmoving—the understanding of it lacks the material support turning into a translucent sign through which content becomes illuminated. Still, in the midst of the tongue being one, meaning is always the same, but matter, as a mere redundancy, accumulates and turns out many. Together with Pluvie, Glared arrives at the conclusion that it is in the practice of repetition that any material disaggregation or disarrangement can possibly take place, by means of which unfamiliar patterns bring up a gap between elements and their past iterations, meaning is interrupted and displaced—getting partially fixed anew in those latest arrangements—and the continuum of sound and speech gains back its essential instability and uncertainty necessary for difference to become a discrete and perceivable event.