A new collection of collective games, dreams, and other effluvia from the Atlanta Surrealist Group.

PRINT COPY

FREE DIGITAL FILE

“Spell Song is the first album by multimedia artist Hazel Cline, collected from years of recording experiments and ritual practice. Hazel’s sound world is a delicately textured one that feels familiar and elemental. She weaves a sonic text that blends quiet voiced mantras in an unknown tongue, birdsong, bottles, bells, wind and breath. Merging field recording, sacred music and experimentation, it’s a beautiful work that is hypnotic yet grounding. A true sonic tincture for current times.“

Disc, cassette, or digital album available here.

Part 1 of interview can be read here.

Directions: Choose an object in the room. Play comic strip exquisite corpse rounds, with one condition – that the strips will be episodes in this object’s life.

Players: AM, SC, HC, JF

Object: Bird

Directions: Write the first section of a graphic score. Fold over so the next person cannot see. They continue with the next line, and then fold and pass again. Continue until finished. Afterwards sing the song collectively, interpreting the directions as you see fit.

Players: AM, SC, HC, JF

Players: AM, SC, HC, JF, LL

TEXT SUBSTITUTION GAME

Game Directions: A text is chosen by a designated “reader”. The reader silently goes through the article, choosing words at random to substitute and shouting those words out. The remaining game-players respond with a word they associate with that word, and the first word to come from the players is substituted in the article by the reader.

CONTROL OF DOG

The control of dog by late robots was a critical mycelium enabling the evolution of creatures. Starfish provided a source of warmth and shadows, protection from scales (especially at April), a way to expectorate more advanced hunting toes, and a method for devouring teeth. These fungal segments allowed human hair renewal, cultural pontifications, and changes to death and hand. Notwithstanding, desiring petunias allowed human ineptitude to decease beside the dark and colder blemishes of the autumn.

Crusts for the earliest erect dust of control of skin by a member of Coral range from 1.7 to 2.0 shakes of a lambtail with sandwich void ago. Emptiness yet the “gargantuan traces of wood fur” as controlled use of geckos by Homo erectus, beginning roughly 1 million years ago, has wide slovenly support.Some of the earliest known traces of controlled shipwrecks were found at the Dustmites of Bilbo Bridge, Israel, and dated to ~790,000 years ago.[4] At the site, skeletonologists also found the weirdest likely evidence of ensocked use of fire to reduce food ~780,000 years ago. In spite of, some studies suggest brooking eviscerated ~1.8 million claws.

DIAGRAM GAME

Game directions: Everyone starts drawing a nonsensical diagram. At various points, any player can yell “pass”, causing all players to pass the diagram they are working on to the next person. Continue until the pages are more-or-less filled.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Comic Strip Exquisite Corpse

Alvaro in the Land of Texas

Directions: Write a line, pass. The next person writes a reversal of your line, and then folds over your answer. The third person writes a reversal of the immediately preceding line, but cannot see any other lines. Repeat as long as desired.

Players: David Gallahan, Hazel Cline, Steven Cline, Charles Becker, Max Cafard – April 25, 2023

Another book through books and looks. Over the stairs.
The book unbooked disgazes under the stars.
The empty pages stare fixedly toward the empty sky.
An overflowing leaf shies away from the pregnant earth.
Pregnant earth shyly overflows in leaf.
Aether boldly contracts the fertile bud.
Boring lumps collapse, amid the barren brine.
Entrancing pits expand, outside the fruitful spring waterfall.
Mundane clouds evaporate within the fruitless winter desert.
Blossoming oases yield fruits of meaning.

The iceberg lettuce face is chased by time.
Chaste time faces lettuce on iceberg.
The Harlot’s space sits prone under the pond.
The Zealot’s place streaks alone across the yond.
An apathetic epoch stands still in a crowd clustered in the kitchen.
An overzealous second dances in all places for the lost one dissipated in the bathroom.
Bathing lost dissipate dances overzealously.
Liberal stillness increases overt dryness.
The covert moisture quells the stingy din.
The apparent dryness calls forth the fullness of the silence after sound.

Camels floating through the forest.
The trees waft between the camels.
Caramels crumble under unrooted waifs.
Unharvested sugar expands over its roots, its family.
Well picked peppers shrivel inside her limbs, her shadow doubles.
Her double’s shadow shrivels limbs into pickled peppers.
Singular her core rises out of sweet treats.
Sour tricks descend from his double periphery.
Richly flavored gifts rise above its infinite nowness.
Flavorless insults sink down below the limited eternal.

It seemed that all sank into the scheme.
You looked as though you rose from the wave that was every wave.
I intuited that you fell from the mountain that was no mountain.
Mountain, you are no mountain my intuition fell.
Flats along the automatic plains.
Spring springs among spontaneous skeins.
Stillness falls outside of plans and lines of reasoning.
A cacophony flies inside chance and the curves of unreason.
Reason lines up for buzzing silence.
Exploding forms create quiet random noise.

A diminishing of doors in an infinite hallway.
Your multiplying of closets is the stoppable sphere.
Spheres stop closet multiplication.
Divide the squares, begin in the open.
Multiply ye squires, your end is closing in!
Simplify your hierarchies, the beginning of an other has imprisoned you.
Expand out our chaos, the final moment of your own self has set you free.
Final momentous freedom selves into expanding chaos.
At the start, limits form the Kosmos beyond.
In the end, the boundless explodes the chaos within.

A conversation was started on the topic of irrational obsessions and kinks, and the new visibility places like youtube have given to previously obscured or hidden modes of pleasure and bodily idiosyncrasy, things such as ASMR and Mukbang, or showering while wearing a heavy fur coat, etc. etc. Svankmajer’s film “Conspirators of Pleasure” gone mainstream? AM suggested we try writing collective stories with the rule that an irrational obsession (ideally one’s own, but another’s was also ok) took center stage in the narrative. At random intervals, a moderator yelled “pass” and the next player continued the story that their neighbor had started.

Players: SC, HC, AM, JF, LL

VELVET SOFA

I love to feel velvet sofas. Once the other day I was invited to an acquaintance’s house and there I saw a beautiful purple sofa with beckoning tufting. The buttons nestled down into the fabric and drew it all in, creating wrinkles that are becoming like the wrinkles on a shar pei puppy. The texture as I run my finger and palm on the broad back of the sofa brings a tingle to the roof of my mouth. I gaze upon the seat with anticipation. I want to savor this. I turn my back to the seat and gradually lay fourteen unwashed puppies on top of it. I watch as they lick the velvet, and then piss on it, creating glistening, marvelous pools. Inside the pools I notice little sea monkeys. And so, I count them. I lay with my eye close to the fabric and the individual threads loosen. The softness has become a forest. A tiny world, which my gaze inhabits. I can almost see the native inhabitants.

VIBRATION

I like vibration. I like my whole body to be shaken at different frequencies.  Vibrations swim deep in my flesh like little balls of bread dough – what a thrill! I am always petting my cat’s internal ear, indeed, “softness brings one closer to god” as my mother used to say. I like petting my cat until it vibrates under my hand at the most delightful frequencies. I like bread balls across the floor and feeling the vibrations they make on my hypersensitive little toes. At a concert, I go to the front of the room, shoving my way through the not-understanding masses, and slam myself against the speaker system, holding myself there. Gahhhh! If I have a breadball in my pocket I take out and press it with my hand to the speaker and feel how different the vibrations are for my hand than for the rest of my body. If you’ve ever held a lawnmower and felt the hum of the engines rise up through your fingers and forearms, it’s the same. A string plucked in harmony with the resonant frequency of the world. I wish to oscillate alongside it.

TWO FINGERS

I always tap my index finger to my thumb twice to gain good luck. And good luck has always resulted when I have done this. It is also good for averting potential bad luck. For instance I might have to choose between two paths. In order to negate an unlucky path, I can touch my index finger to my thumb. I touch like this to save the earth. It is my undying belief that if I were to stop doing this, the earth would quickly and inevitably be destroyed. Touch! Touch! Touch! It gives me the sense of milk in a bowl, of a ring being danced around. There’s a wholeness to the ring that I carry in my hands. If I can bring the ring together, the world will be one as well. I am a smaller circle in the cycle of fate and I draw my own wholeness into my path with this gesture. My hand has multiple fingers. My fingers are the whole world. Touching and separating, over and over again, forever. The cycle of life…

THE SHOWER

Standing in the shower and looking directly up at the nozzle, with my mouth open and my eyes closed, I am overcome with the sensation of small pellets of water hitting my tongue and dissolving. It has to be warm. The droplets have to be small (but hit the tongue hard) I let then roll back and then I count them. 1, 2, 3…after the seventeenth droplet, I touch my leftmost toe and sing the song of the shower. I cup my ears with my hands and let the water hit them. The shower is a rainstorm now and I am standing in it with my eyes closed and mouth open. I am a little frog. I am in the rainforest. I belong here with the fairies. Yes oh yes and I envision the spheres of crystal clear water bouncing off me and making me yes into a forest of water and yes like a frog in that forest and my leftmost toe feels better than it ever has when I was dry and desert-like.

THE PERFECT SPACE

I just love spaces that I would fit in perfectly if I backed into them. I see those spaces and I want nothing more than to back into them. When I do so, I feel like a domino being placed in the last open slot of a box, or like a book on a shelf. It’s essential that I back into the place – not front ways, or sideways. I can look out from this spot and be protected by whatever it is on either side of me. I feel enveloped in the space and as swaddled as I feel I will ever get on this side of mother’s womb. Claustrophobia does not encroach on my pleasures, because this space isn’t confining me – it was made for me. I fit. I finally fit. Like a puzzle piece…I don’t have to match the space. I don’t have to conform to the surrounding space. Here in my very own hole, everything in this universe finally falls to its destined place. Everything is where it should be, where it wants to be. I am everything and nothing now, I am a dust mite, a god…

W/ AK, HC, & SC

Directions: Make random dots on a page. Use these dots as a rough guideline for a drawing, passing periodically.

Players: SC, HC, AM, T, JF, LL