LUXTRAPATHY, CAPITALOCENE AND THE LOGICADE
https://www.bilsmith.com/artworks
10 Images. 22” X 16”; 55.9 X 40.6 cm
Oil, Mica Flakes, Molten Salt, Conductive Ink, Xylene, Colored Pencil, Metallic Spray Foam, Ink on FujiFlex SuperGloss
Edition of 5 with 2 APs
It echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic phylum: a code-injection from outside the system, freezing not just motion, but epistemic certainty. "Freeze" implies the suspension of temporal identity; "Refreeze" suggests an artificial reinvention of form after liquefaction. The statue below—an echo of the Ephesian Artemis—becomes the frozen vector of this conceptual alchemy, encapsulating multiplicity (the breasts, the layers, the ornamental headdress) as feminized technology.
This score, titled via a vertical golden banner as LIMOLLELEOPELLI, embodies the confluence of kinetic energy, choreographic fragmentation, and the industrial topology of the notational machine. It is at once a mechanical scroll, an exploded diagram, and a trans-musical fiction—a proto-instrumental architecture rendered as a surrealistic map.
At its core, this work is neither traditionally musical nor purely graphic—it is a performative prosthesis, bridging auditory experience with biomechanical form. It invites the performer not to interpret, but to engineer presence, to activate a serialized cinematic body.
More to come...
2018-2023
10 Images. 24” X 9”; 61 X 22.9 cm.
Ink, Dry Ice, Black Oil Paint, Black Watercolor, Gouache (black), Solar Ink, Walnut Ink, Chalk, Liquid Ruthenium, Ochre Pigment Powder, Manganese Dioxide Powder, Dry hermochromic pigment Powder, Acrylic on Epson Signature Worthy Velvet Fine Art.
Edition of 6 with 2 APs
Commentary from Gabe Hudson
It begins with a whisper—a chemical hush. Not in sound, but in media: Dry Ice and Liquid Ruthenium, crushed into something that approaches notation only through the bold nerve of its presumption. A stave becomes a sediment; clefs dissolve into Manganese Dioxide; the ink itself rebels into ochre particulates and thermochromic hesitation. This is a violin score that remembers music the way an artifact remembers a ritual—it knows its shape, but not its source.
“To Maintain a Certain Might” is not merely a title—it is a challenge, an invocation, and a betrayal. What does it mean for a piece of music to hold might? Not just sonic force, but resistance, secrecy, presence. Each of the ten pages unfolds like a scroll of war correspondence from a world where harmony has been outlawed and only solar ink and chalky whispers remain.
The materials are not incidental; they are arguments. The black gouache crusts in corners like regret. Walnut ink drips in lines too deliberate to be accidental, too inconsistent to be directive. Here we enter Chabon’s territory: where nostalgia for order is betrayed by the seduction of the baroque. The score does not ask to be played; it dares to be interpreted, with each graphic unit—be it pharmaceutical syllable (“Thalirenol,” “Cutibax,” “Aldutor”), or near-asemic rupture—serving as a narrative shard from a world adjacent to ours, though darker, denser, more holy.
Indeed, it reads like the script of an invented pharmacopoeia, a blacklisted pharmacological opera that might have been composed by a fugitive chemist, writing to outwit regulation or God. The strings of text—“tru-4 tru-4 tru-4,” “Hepacine Tristryl,” “Macrodene Aceranon,” “Jysity-revola”—are neither instructions nor ingredients but talismans, each syllable both invocation and inoculation. This is language as curse, language as salvage.
And then there is the shape. The vertical bleed of black oils and rust powders gives each page the look of having been stored improperly—on purpose. The score seems unearthed rather than printed, the ink bleeding backward through time. The staff lines and text do not simply overlay the paper—they seem to have erupted through it.
The agency required of the performer is immense, bordering on cruel. It’s not simply about realizing a pitch or a rhythm, but about conjuring a myth. One does not play this score so much as interpret its residue, like a scholar of medieval maps decoding notations for dragons and lost continents. Each gesture on the violin must answer a visual provocation: “What does a black gouache blister sound like?” “How does one bow a thermochromic ellipse?”
At its most intelligible, the score resembles scientific graffiti, or the kind of visual rhetoric scrawled on the walls of underground labs in speculative fiction. It offers no safety net of tradition, but instead asks its performer—and its reader—to take the violin into a new dialect, one for which there is no dictionary, only intuition.
This is not a score that documents music. It is a score that performs its own becoming, page by page, medium by unstable medium, ink by sweating chemical. If Chabon were to write its libretto, it would be buried within a footnote to a footnote, trailing off in mid-sentence, replaced by a diagram of something half-remembered and entirely unrepeatable.
“To Maintain a Certain Might” is both relic and prophecy, and the violinist? She is neither interpreter nor servant, but rather the sole surviving speaker of a language invented by shadows.
Today, a period in which notation has already decayed past utility and entered an era of alchemical semiotics, Bil Smith, that cartographer of disintegrated instruction, produced a score titled Cake. The subtitle—For Dunnett Snare Drum—is a misleading whisper, for the piece is less about percussion than it is about the collapse of clarity in the face of excess articulation.
It is not a piece. It is a fetish.
It is not a score. It is a documentation of conceptual torment.
The performer (here reduced to a ceremonial actuary) is given a paper to decipher. The paper—call it parchment, call it a wound—contains not instructions but inscriptions. High glyphs. Seismograph lines masquerading as meter. Peaks and valleys of what appears to be frequency, amplitude, or perhaps the fever chart of a dissociative trance.
Let us note: each segment of the score is adorned (contaminated? adored?) by the silhouette of a girl.
Blue Girl (upper left quadrant): Standing, full-breasted, hips poised in a lyrical slant suggesting proto-disco or code-switching. This figure—rendered in pure cyan, no gradients—does not instruct, but surveils. She is the Oracle. The prelude.
Hot Pink Girl: Reclined. A recumbent succubus among time signatures. One leg raised, perhaps in invitation, perhaps surrender. She is embedded midway through the graphic cluster, between frenetic verticalities that resemble either drum roll simulation or seismic trauma.
Gold Girl (right side): A muse or mocker. Staring across from a plateau of irrational tempo changes and nullified phrasing. Her silhouette reads like advertising. Her inclusion is protest or pornography.
Green Girl (bottom right): Collapsed. Dreamlike. The descent figure. Rendered in a sage-like moss, she is situated at the edge of the page—the metaphysical edge of the event horizon where notation cannot survive.
Functionally, the piece is impossible. And so it is irresistible. It is architecture that defies habitation. Music not to be played, but to be witnessed. The drum itself (Dunnett, a brand known for sharp shells and a ghostly over-ring) becomes a phallus, a quill, a ritual object. Its tautness contradicts the chaos.
And yet it flutters. The score itself slouches down the page, dragging its legs like a wounded soldier in an information war. The notation—once confident—now pleads with gravity, bleeding toward the footer. This descent may be aesthetic, or may be existential. In either case, the page is falling. Not the performer. Not the drum. The page.
There is no literal cake in Cake. Or perhaps the girls are the cake. Or perhaps we are. The treat that is consumed by interpretation, devoured by a performer desperate for resolution, chewing on symbols that will never yield flavor.
The tempo markings are either lies or confessions.
To play this score is to become a victim of it.
To study it is to be made complicit in its seduction.
In the evolving landscape of contemporary composition, where the boundaries between visual art, linguistic play, and sonic event are deliberately destabilized, I introduce a provocative conceptual framework: Pelippopism. As a term coined from the concatenation of visual, onomatopoetic, and pseudo-Hellenistic fragments, Pelippopism proposes a multi-modal ideology that situates the musical score not only as a site of instruction or sonic coding, but as a poly-referential object of cognition, rupture, and performative agency.
At its core, Pelippopism asserts that a musical score, particularly within Smith's oeuvre, is not an antecedent to sound, but a non-hierarchical parallel to sound, language, and architectural form. The term itself, with its recursive loops of plosive and sibilant sounds, evokes the vibrational logic of both semiotic interference and kinetic movement—sound as a glyphic vibration, notation as optical residue.
In my compositions, such as Effluvium and Retro-Gradient Lustration, or A Game of Curtains, Glass Door, Twice Closed, Pelippopism reveals itself through the layering of modular symbol-sets, syntactic disobedience, and a rejection of stasis. Scores become "anarchival zones" in which the functions of notation are subjected to erasure, overwriting, and distortion—gestures that enact Pelippopist refusal.
Pelippopist works often begin as corrupted vectors—post-architectural blueprints infected by linguistic spores and pharmacological diagrammatics. On the page, this takes the form of compositional glyphs that recall industrial design patents, histological charts, or circuit board overlays. The typographic elements, often modeled after extralinguistic scripts or proprietary fonts, function not as legible carriers of meaning but as disrupted conduits—subject to failure, re-appropriation, and misreading.
In this framework, Pelippopism is less a doctrine than a behavior. The composer acts not as author, but as cartographer of chaotic fields. The score becomes an event horizon where disciplinary silos collapse: notation as textile, performance as forensic audit, typography as bio-linguistic residue.
Pelippopism demands that performers not interpret, but inhabit the score. Rather than seeking fidelity, the performer becomes a strategic interlocutor between unstable systems. In one example, the presence of transparent euphoniums, spectrographic glyph overlays, and asemic typographies requires the musician to interact with the score as though it were a spatialized hologram—reading not in time, but across layers of opacity, feedback, and contradiction.
Such performative instability is not an error but a core feature of the Pelippopist ontology. The score is not a pre-image of performance, but a provocative partner, oscillating between architecture, image, and ruin.
Conceptually, Pelippopism aligns with para-Futurist sensibilities, Lettrist dérives, and the anti-systemic gestures of Jean Tinguely and Hanne Darboven. However, my embrace of pharmaceutical nomenclature, forensic simulation, and speculative linguistics places Pelippopism within a distinctly post-biotechnological aesthetic. It is a mode that treats the score as a semiotic organ, constantly rewriting itself through contamination, refusal, and breakdown.
In this light, Pelippopism is not merely a neologism. It is a methodological disorder that invites mutation, a radical anti-mnemonic strategy for encoding musical thought in the age of spectral excess and information decay.
Pelippopism offers a new topology for thinking the musical score—not as static artifact, but as a feedback vector, a non-linear libretto, and a semiotic surface infected by language, image, and speculative pharmacology. It serves as both aesthetic provocation and conceptual scaffolding—a refusal to resolve, a demand to reconceive.
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| Excerpt from String Quartet. "Explorer, Producer, Stoic After Your Fashion" |
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| "Jerked Into The Nexus of the Abandoned Motorcade." Performance Guidance. |
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| "Jerked Into The Nexus of the Abandoned Motorcade." Performance Guidance. |
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| "Jerked Into The Nexus of the Abandoned Motorcade." Performance Guidance. |
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| "Jerked Into The Nexus of the Abandoned Motorcade." Performance Guidance. |
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| "Jerked Into The Nexus of the Abandoned Motorcade." Cello Score Page 1. |
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| "Jerked Into The Nexus of the Abandoned Motorcade." Trumpet Score Page 1. |
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| "Jerked Into The Nexus of the Abandoned Motorcade." Score detail. |
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| "Jerked Into The Nexus of the Abandoned Motorcade." E Guitar Score Part. |
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| "Jerked Into The Nexus of the Abandoned Motorcade." Cello Score Page 3. |
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| "Jerked Into The Nexus of the Abandoned Motorcade." E Guitar |
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| "Jerked Into The Nexus of the Abandoned Motorcade." Trumpet Page 2. |
