SUNDAY SILENCE (Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM)

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 11/24/2024.

https://voiceofvashon.org/sunday-silence/

Late night confessions, early morning prayers... introducing SUNDAY SILENCE. Offering a weekly, hour-long host of devotionals in electronic, ambient, and experimental music, CLOACA reaches wide to make contact with body and soul alike. As we bid farewell to each week’s end, descend into a midnight baptism and let yourself become present with her spirit sounds made real in ecstasy, transformation, catharsis. For this debut episode, we are touching down on songs that contour the oft-diminishing, always broadening experience of love—that most divine of feelings—with selections from Mabe Fratti, Azu Tiwaline, Klein, and more.

CLOACA is Vashon-based DJ / artist, Delphine Tress Morrow. She keeps the faith that music shared is a public service, a liturgy.

SUNDAY SILENCE #1: Inhaling Eros

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 12/01/2024.

voiceofvashon.org/sunday-silence/

This is SUNDAY SILENCE Ep. 2—the persistence of memory. If, as Freud claimed, every finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it, there is something essential, perhaps even a prophetic kernel, inside of a memory. On this week’s episode, we are drawing out these lines of sight, listening for the fissures unsealed by the act of looking back. From the gently angular techno of Ken Ishii through to the experimental soundscape composition of Nour Sohkon's Beirut Birds, we discover memory as the shared sensorium of the past as it slides into the present.

SUNDAY SILENCE #2: A fleeting image in the moving water

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 12/08/2024.

voiceofvashon.org/sunday-silence/

This week, we are grounding down into the necessary, transfiguring, life-giving pulse sounded out by artists in and from Palestine. These echoes, this poetry, places a crucial demand on us: by listening, to hold open the present to resounding otherwise—with selections from Asifeh, Dakn, and Julmud, among others.

SUNDAY SILENCE #3: “I melt at your glances and become music”

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 12/15/2024.

voiceofvashon.org/sunday-silence/

This week’s show takes its inspiration from the Dostoevsky short story, “Belye nochi,” and more particularly, from Luchino Visconti’s radiant film adaptation, Le notti bianche (1957)—the White Nights. Although Dostoevsky was referring to the famous (perhaps anguished) summer nights in St. Petersburg when the sun doesn't set until after midnight, and the sky never reaches complete darkness, Visconti transposes this phenomenon to a snowy winter in Livorno, Italy. What results is a luminous study of the thresholds of and tension between opacity and clarity. From within this suspended relationship, this episode of SUNDAY SILENCE explores the enrichment of sound upon the diminution of the image through selections from Aho Ssan, Mindy Meng Wang, and Remo Fernandes: what new things can be heard upon the silencing of our vision?

SUNDAY SILENCE #4: White Nights

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 12/22/2024.

voiceofvashon.org/sunday-silence/

At least since Judy Garland instructed us to “make the yuletide gay,” we have been acquainted with the feeling that something is rotten in the state of the holiday. Judy promises that we just have to wait until next year when faithful friends who are dear to us will be near to us once more; it has more the sound of a desperate bet than a vow made with any certainty… but it is the muddling through somehow that is interesting. This week, we are listening in the precarity of the moment—no golden past, no untroubled future—to hopefully find what calls us back this festive impasse each year. What do the lonely hearts hear in the chill of the night? With answerings from A.k.Adrix, Rachika Nayar, and Sananda Maitreya.

SUNDAY SILENCE #5: Leave Me Alone, Don't Leave Me Lonely

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 12/29/2024.

voiceofvashon.org/sunday-silence/

Walter Benjamin famously juxtaposed two conceptions of time—on the one hand: the ’homogeneous, empty time’ of history’s victors, the groundhog’s day of empire in which each day of the calendar is identical and infinitely repeatable. On the other: ‘Jetztzeit’ (literally: “now-time”)—a notion of time that is ripe with revolutionary potential, ready to take a “tiger’s leap into the past” and radically grab hold of it, both redemptively and apocalyptically. The Jetztzeit is related to how both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas understood God’s existence in time as nunc stans, the “remaining now,” residing in the ‘sublimity of an ever-present eternity,’ as Augustine writes. This week, we are standing in the Time That Remains, asking ourselves what it means for ourselves to live on in a now imbued with both incredible danger and radical presence, with sounds from musclecars, Otik, and Space Afrika.

SUNDAY SILENCE #6: The Time That Remains

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 01/05/2025.

voiceofvashon.org/sunday-silence/

The Feast of the Epiphany is upon us on the 6th of January—a time of reflection, celebration, and resolution. In his achingly blue short story, “The Dead,” James Joyce uses the Twelfth Night as the gateway to consider the access that we have to those who are no longer in our lives, and they to us, in this solemn season. Joyce’s protagonist, Gabriel, slips through this gateway at the end of the story: “His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world; the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.” This soon gets imaginatively projected outward in the story’s famous last lines, exploded onto the image of snow falling on a graveyard: “It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” In this week’s episode, we are reflecting on what such blue epiphanies await us, with distant music from Bianca Scout, Laryssa Kim, and Lauren Duffus.

SUNDAY SILENCE #7: Blue Epiphanies

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 01/12/2025.

voiceofvashon.org/sunday-silence/

Metaphors, particularly those suffused with the heft of violence, surround our attempts to describe our ways of loving; the idioms abound: all’s fair in love and war, love to death, broken hearted, shoot your shot, drop dead gorgeous, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, man-eater. However, our integrity within the vehemence of these feelings depends on our ability to separate word and act. This week’s episode asks what happens when this duality is devoured, turning to the mythic tale of Penthesilea, especially as dramatized by Heinrich von Kleist. In Kleist’s play, the titular Amazon queen falls in love with the Greek hero, Achilles, on the battlefields of Troy. After much frenzy of battle and romance, Penthesilea tears apart the body of her beloved, the fidelity of her love literalized between her teeth. She asks, defending herself from madness: what is the difference between a kiss (kuss) and a bite (biss)? They rhyme. Gorging our hearts out with music from Jlin, Bookworms, and the concept horse.

SUNDAY SILENCE #8: Kisses, Bites, They Rhyme

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 01/19/2025.

voiceofvashon.org/sunday-silence/

This week’s title is taken from Italian ethnographer, Ernesto de Martino’s 1961 study of Tarantism: THE LAND OF REMORSE. Tarantism, a collective ritual developed in Southern Italian, in which a woman (typically) would fall into a kind of possessive trance reportedly caused by the bite of a spider, a trance that could only be exorcized by a communal musical practice of dancing to the pizzica or tarantella for hours, even days, on end. For de Martino, tarantism was not a disease, but an instrument of social reintegration for subaltern peoples, a way to access historical continuity for those moving through compounding experiences of sexual trauma, gender trouble, and resource discrimination. For us, it is a way to understand and become present with the layered perceptual worlds embedded within Italian electronic music. This first part (of three) relies heavily on two archival projects: TARANTISMO: ODYSSEY OF AN ITALIAN RITURAL (Flee, 2019) and WELCOME TO PARADISE: ITALIAN DREAM HOUSE 89-93 (Safe Trip, 2017), with additional music from Donato Dozzy, Baffo Banfi, and Sylvia Kastel.

SUNDAY SILENCE #9: The Land of Remorse, Pt I

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 01/26/2025.

voiceofvashon.org/sunday-silence/

This week is la seconda parte of our continued odyssey into the irresistible identifications of the Tarantata: The Land of Remorse. De Martino, the author of the titular study, observes a yawning hunger for the world to be otherwise: the tarantati, he notes, “feel shattered, smashed, shredded, broken, knocked down, wounded, weary—stricken with a deep tediousness with themselves and their surroundings.” In other words, the afflicted are not simply acting out psychological abnormalities, but indeed were and are utopian philosophers of the present—wounded by the opening of history, an opening that can go by many names, they held tightly to a fundamental desire for their material worlds to be flung into the not-yet, envisioning something else, however melancholically, into being through dance. This week we turn to La Serpiente, Katatonic Silentio, and Luciano Cilio to remain along this same threshold, acknowledging that these historical wounds have never left us.

SUNDAY SILENCE #10: The Land of Remorse, Part II

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 02/02/2025.

voiceofvashon.org/show/sunday-silence/

This is the concluding part of a trilogy of episodes exploring the correspondence between contemporary electronic music from Italy and the Southern Italian miracle of Tarantism, the ecstatic dance and musical practice locally believed to be instigated by the bite of a spider. As de Martino shows, and as we have seen, whether or not the spider was ever a “real” actor in this web is irrelevant; it is the web itself that matters, a web of histories enacted, wounds reworked, and sensoriums transformed. Among this sensual abundance, this final part provides sensations to metabolize after the music has ended, with mutations from Valentina Magaletti, Caterina Barbieri, and Silvia Tarozzi.

SUNDAY SILENCE #11: The Land of Remorse, Part III

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 02/09/2025.

voiceofvashon.org/sunday-silence/

One need not be a chamber to be haunted—so Emily Dickinson warns us in the poem from which this episode takes its title. The ghosts we meet at Midnight’s hour, or any manner of wraith hidden in a House, so-called haunted, she insists, are far safer for confrontation than the veiled mysteries lurking in the immaterial corridors of the mind. It is the layering of this confrontation—“Ourself—behind Ourself—Concealed”—that interests us here, for between one self and another is the Superior Spectre of our accumulated histories. This episode addresses itself to these moonless encounters with such opaque horrors, featuring music from Yara Asmar, Gabriel Chwojnik, and Meitei.

SUNDAY SILENCE #12: Ourself—behind Ourself—Concealed—

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 02/16/2025.

voiceofvashon.org/show/sunday-silence/

Silence is not the absence of sound, cannot be defined through negation. No—silence has a texture; it is an expression, a gift, a causeway. As John Cage insisted, silence is only ever a question of learning how to listen in abundance. This episode takes flight from both the snowy deathworlds of Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 spaghetti western, The Great Silence, as well as a short film installation by the Puerto Rico-based duo, Allora & Calzadilla. Collaborating with famed speculative fiction writer, Ted Chiang, they present to us a register of silence that is full—of the screams in disappearance, of the cries around neglect, of the soft whispers towards extinction—in a 17-minute piece also called, The Great Silence. Come and consider such discrete music, with KMRU, Nyokabi Kariũki, and Fred Frith.

SUNDAY SILENCE #13: The Great Silence

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 02/23/2025.

voiceofvashon.org/sunday-silence/

This week we are leaving behind the impedimenta—no concepts, no large frameworks, just plain rapture. In lieu of the skeletons that have recently supported these shows, we here have only the lustrous simplicity of the body and its pleasures. In turning to the dubby, broken techno of the London-Based label, Well Street Records, I am hoping to find space in which to share and create nothing more/less than sincere enjoyment—with music from Sputnik One, Yushh, and Ruff Cherry.

SUNDAY SILENCE #14: The Passion according to Well Street

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 03/02/2025.

https://voiceofvashon.org/show/sunday-silence/

For French historiographer, Michel Foucault, the most threatening aspect of queerness for structures of power primed for normalization and discipline is its ability to create relationships of all kinds. This week we are responding to Foucault’s summons, his beckoning of gays to liaise, from his 1981 interview, “Friendship as a Way of Life”—sitting in sounds that instantiate this most boundless of desires. With contributions from Lamin Fofana, Kiss Facility, and Tomu DJ.

SUNDAY SILENCE #15: Friendship as a Way of Life

03/23/2025

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In light of the ongoing atrocities of the Israeli regime—in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Syria, in Lebanon, and elsewhere—this week we will once again be turning to the politics of noise. In order to do so, this hour is composed entirely of selections from Unexplained Sound Group’s Anthology of Electroacoustic Lebanese Music (2018 / https://unexplainedsoundsgroup.bandcamp.com/album/anthology-of-electroacoustic-lebanese-music). 

Overlaid on these challenging and revitalizing sounds will be the full narration from Lebanese artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s short film, The Diary of a Sky (http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com), translated from the original Arabic. I invite you to sit in the noise, let it disassemble you, and hear what is emergent.

SUNDAY SILENCE #16: Kilon Yaani Kilon

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 06/01/2025.

https://voiceofvashon.org/show/sunday-silence/

SUNDAY SILENCE returns, after a short hiatus, as a monthly show. Thanks for sticking around. I return shouldering the weight of a mind flushed with the quiet, searching ache of a clarity that doesn’t come easy. This episode explores what it means to sit with that uncertainty—to be swept up in a sea change and still reach for bridges: intimacies, distractions, small joys that hold us taut against the tension of the unresolved. When answers fall away, is there still meaning in the asking? In staying vulnerable, in letting curiosity guide us, in continuing to pry our honesty wide open? Maybe this is just a simple reminder that stillness is not stagnation; even the murky depths can be a fertile ground for something unseen to stir and grow.

SUNDAY SILENCE #17: Log Jam, Pith Daze

Aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 07/06/2025.

https://voiceofvashon.org/show/sunday-silence/

In 1851, an English astronomer established the Greenwich Meridian—a geographical reference that passes through the Royal Observatory in London. In 1884, the International Meridian Conference asserted the Greenwich Meridian as the universal standard prime meridian for zero degrees longitude. In 1894, an anarchist carried a bomb through Greenwich Park, intending to destroy the public clock of the Royal Observatory, with which time clocks throughout Britain were synchronized; the bomb exploded prematurely, but the thunder repeats like an irregular heart… 

Time is not just measure, but a shadow-play, a median drawn in silence, a subtle line slicing through the skin of the world. This month—in the place where desire, dominion, and memory meet—we are exploring music that does not merely decorate a time signature, but that consecrates historical wounds and devotes itself to reckoning. This is a music that refuses the sterility of perfection in favor of texture, vulnerability, and dissonance.

SUNDAY SILENCE #18: Sync Error (0°)

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM on 08/03/2025.

https://voiceofvashon.org/show/sunday-silence/

From within our age of the militarized use of sound, of sonic warfare—which Steve Goodman defines as the use of force via acoustic machines to modulate bodies and populations—this episode is something very humble: a deep acknowledgement of the many ways in which underground and experimental Black Atlantic music culture offers us the opportunity to hear the world otherwise, to encounter something literally unheard of. This episode of Sunday Silence, then, does nothing more than look around this sonic battlefield, clutching this acknowledgement close to its chest—and listens. Featuring favorites old and new from Dedekind Cut, Kelman Duran, Qur'an Shaheed, Ashley Holmes, Niecy Blues, and fragments from Little Egypt Collective’s 2024 short film, On the Battlefield.

SUNDAY SILENCE #19: On the Battlefield

Originally aired on the Voice of Vashon KVSH 101.9FM.

https://voiceofvashon.org/show/sunday-silence/

This episode originates in a twinned experience: beholding Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s photograph, The Vapor of Melancholy (2014); and the beginning of a dream called Ale. Weerasethakul’s work is a quiet, explosive portrait of his sleeping partner exhaling smoke as fireworks bloom—a vision suspended between desire, premonition, and evanescence. Whether the photograph prepared me for a startling intimacy, or this intimacy helped me to retroactively enter the portal beckoning within this photograph, I don’t think I can yet say—likely both and neither. As a spectral character intones in Weeasethakul’s film, Tropical Malady (2004): “Every drop of my blood sings our song—a song of happiness. There... do you hear it?” Inviting you (you) to glimpse the light left behind in the wake of love, to feel the warmth of a creature emergent on your skin, to follow me into the  gateway coruscating in the darkness of her eyes.