2.11.63 by Hex Kist

Three musical experiments along Sylvia. For Sylvia, or really against her--reconfiguring sandpaper on velvet word choices. Seeking a common language, that of whispering blight and deafening truce. Exercise of iconoclasm against my icon; merciless heresies disrupting verses once sacred. Into the cauldron of mourning.

TRACKS

1. "Kitchen." A song reflecting on Plath's suicide. Reworked verses from her poem "Ariel" play against samples of two TV shows broadcasted the day of her death: an episode of To Tell the Truth that included an advertisement for a headache medicine Anacin which promised to fight depression; and the first episode of Julia Child's The French Chef, cooking a Boeuf Bourguignon in the oven.

2. "Moon." Taking a short sample from Plath's "The Thin People," a poem of struggle and martial imaginary... and the knife. Oh the knife.

3. "Greengold." Sylvia Plath had a difficult relationship with her mother, which she explored lyrically in her poem Medusa, here broken down amidst ocean and water inspired manipulated samples, like a dishwasher.

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Hex Kist is the post-Romantic, one-woman experimental project of Jimena Hellebore, threading and collaging fragile musical remains and their intimacies... Hex Kist is centrally concerned with manipulating found sounds, musical decompositions and relics of old forgotten songs, with fragments of collapsed melodies that once were perhaps beautiful and now are broken and submerged in a tempest of noise. But there can be satirical laughter too in mourning; desire amidst encounters with death; the ironies of meaninglessness and their narratives. To gaze into the burial chamber is to hear echoes of life pulling you into death. All those words show a line post-Romanticism walks, the line between philosophical depth and gothic melodrama in an age of ennui and technological maladaptations.

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism.” ~Adorno.

"Awaken yourselves, nymphs of the underground. And collage me a pattern in a yonder hotel. Away from seed fields and street siren harvests." ~Anonymous


Hex Kist is the one-woman experimental project of sound-designer and researcher Jimena Hellebore centered on cinematic soundscapes of found sounds and compositional fragments