"In Absentia" is a video poem that I wrote with Pauline Oliveros. Working with Pauline is not something that’s easily explained. She possessed a preternatural receptivity. The video is a split screen, white clouds against blue sky in the top half and stormy clouds with no sky in the bottom half. If you listen, you will hear our voices take turns reciting the poem.
John Most / Crozet, Virginia / Wednesday July 19, 2017
John Most - In Absentia ft. Pauline Oliveros
About Pauline Oliveros: Pauline Oliveros's career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In 2012, she received the John Cage award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. Pauline Oliveros was the founder of "Deep Listening," which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. Pauline Oliveros described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. "Deep Listening is my life practice," she explained, simply. Oliveros was founder of Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer.
