Like the eye, the ear doesn't blink

"Like the eye, the ear doesn’t blink is a book like no other. It includes the up-to-date contents of the archival catalogue of avant-garde soundist Charlie Morrow. Morrow has worked on the cusp and edge of many movements, collaborated with many of the greats in art and sound and this book of lists, serves as a public record, a coming clean, a reckoning of Morrow’s production over a period of 60+ years. Lists (and bibliographies) are, indeed, a kind of biography, but also a kind of poetry, as I suggested in my book LIST FULL: List Poems of Necessary Orderliness, able to illuminate beyond the presumptions of a list’s limitations. This archival record gains further sustenance and resonance as a result of the brilliant graphic design by Goats & Compasses. The design suggests a book beyond page turning, with the print floating off the shadow-embellished pages, freed of the constraints of a conventional book containing a conventional narrative with conventional words to ultimately engage with its surroundings.

It is also an art object, a beautiful thing to hold and behold, that serves as one part musical score of an artist’s yearnings, another part seismographic map of the heart, the graphic EKG output of a life devoted to art and it’s comprehension, and as a geographic-topographic map that depicts Morrow’s site-specific, or rather site-engaging, art that has found him in dialogue with far-flung locations, many in the harsh far north. where the list on every page has to negotiate or interact with the floating symbols of our language disconnected letters that float about on a page cast with shadows. I’m enchanted every time I hold and flip through Like the eye, imagining a surrealist may have blown fairy dust into the pages to transmute it into something far greater than a book you place on a shelf." ~Bart Plantengna

"Part flip book, part catalogue raisonné, and part autobiography, Like the eye, the ear doesn’t blink is, finally, a work of conceptual art chock full of collaboration, invention, and novel ways to conceive the relation of sound, music, words, and ideas." ~Charles Bernstein

"After years – decades in fact – of following Morrow's works and often composing by his side, I've been awed again and again by the amazing range of his interests and doings: the technical genius on the one hand and his delving beyond that into the deeply rooted ethnopoetic and more: the possibilities of music and meaning throughout the sounding and sentient world. In that sense, Like the eye, the ear doesn't blink is not only an archive and a testament but a work of art in itself: an artist's book and a joy to have and to hold." ~Jerome Rothenberg