"The Notational Apothecary: A Neologistic Carnality of Sound and Form"

 

"The Notational Apothecary: A Neologistic Carnality of Sound and Form"

By Bil Smith

What emerges when Rauschenberg’s combines are not hung, but played? When Damien Hirst’s vitrines are not viewed, but scored? When Claus Oldenburg’s soft sculptures soften the rigidity of ledger lines? And what if Jennifer Walshe’s hyper-saturated vocal microcosms are not performed in air but injected like intramuscular interjections into the linguistic musculature of the score itself? The answer: a notational archetype that resists categorization and demands to be metabolized.

Let us call this archetype: "Carnogrammics." A term I coined from “carno”(the flesh of performative media) and (“grammics”)a vector of graphemes and regulated lexical distortion. In Carnogrammics, the score is not merely a semantic vehicle or a visual trigger; it is a somatic sculptural object...part reliquary, part operating table.

Form as Fleshed Phenomenon

Oldenburg’s corpulent realism and the way he imbued the banal with monumentality and play functions here as the material substrate for scoring. Notation is no longer confined to the page, but becomes soft, inflamed, flaccid, and dimensional. Musical direction is bulged into latex, encased in vinyl, and suctioned onto acrylic slabs, its glyphs drooping like fattened chords or pharmacological warnings on post-consumer packaging. Notes are embossed onto the materiality of meat, metaphorically speaking, as if cleaved from the kitchen of late capitalism.

The act of reading this score becomes a performance of touch, resistance, and navigation, not unlike navigating a Hirst cabinet, where meaning is not on the surface but sedimented under layers of repetition, precious materials, and clinical distance. Carnogrammics borrows Hirst’s sterility and irony.  The score may contain neologistic directives like “Cliniduct” or “Virepane,” synthetic names that sound like unapproved treatments for post-tonal disillusionment. Their semantic opacity is part of the system.  They are untranslatable operators, deliberately anti-lexical, recalling my own work with Brand Acumen in naming proprietary pharmaceuticals such as Evenity, Atripla, Vyondys, and Veozah. These names aren’t words; they are suspensions of meaning, tools of influence more than communication.

Montage as Modality

With Rauschenberg, the interface becomes palimpsestic chaos, layered notations that displace linearity. Think of a string quartet not given a single part, but an assemblage...a transparency sheet of antique graphs, muscle tissue scans, barcodes, and corporate spillages. Embedded within these are my neologistic phrases consisting of fricative-heavy, glottal-rich syllables that mimic sonic gestures. A gesture like "Fralixunt" might indicate a vibrato smeared in time, while "Zelquane" demands a percussive over-articulation in an imaginary register.

Scores are not read but parsed, gathered, sifted.

Function, Intention, Delivery

The Carnogrammic score is not an object to interpret but a biosystem to activate. It resists rehearsal and thrives in risk. It proposes that notation is not a conveyance but an aesthetic deterrent. Just as Hirst’s medicine cabinets seduce with visual logic yet betray narrative hollowness, these scores promise legibility but withhold obedience. Their vocabulary, built on pharmaceutical neologisms and para-lexical clusters is unreadable to conventional systems, yet deeply embedded with speculative pharmacodynamics of sound.

The performer is a clinician and vandal, equally.

In this framework, naming and composition collapse into one practice. A gesture, like Traykavex, becomes both a name for a non-existent drug and an instruction to accelerate the bow until tremor gives way to silence. These scores live inside contradictions: the sacred within the mass-produced, the ephemeral in the hyper-defined, the verbal in the unpronounceable.

Toward a New Scoring Ontology

Carnogrammics is not an answer.. It is a clinical trial of form. It offers no standardized measurement of success, only a swelling index of residue: the bowed resin, the tarnished metal, the performer’s sweat collecting on the surface of Hahnemühle paper soaked in tannins and topical anesthetic oils. The aesthetic here is one of compositional toxicity, measured in terms of language, sound, and embodiment.

To compose within this archetype is to write prescriptions no pharmacy can fill except the human voice, the tremor of the hand, and the synthetic linguistics of risk.