Skie Bender

Photo by Jeanne Rice"What incessantly hums through my soul is not always the obvious music. Some sounds scream through the medium of print and paint. And when the artist is ingenious enough, he or she can warp the bounds of the silent medium until sound squashes through the color red or the word 'cat,' just as the profound musician can 'paint a picture.'"

> "The painter Chaim Soutine is a succulent example of brush strokes that speak. His line is not only rhythmical, but his innate color sense and slop of color are also parallel with any bass line, guitar lead, cymbal splash, sultry sax, piano tink or symphonic climax."

> "The Czechoslovakian writer Bohumil Hrabal's book Too Loud a Solitude is about a wastepaper compactor who takes great pride in the assemblage of magazines, banned-book pages, food wrappers and miscellaneous trash that he smashes together to form what he views as a unique piece of art. Ultimately, bigger, better, faster machines take the main character's [also named Hrabal] job from him, so he jumps into his antique machine and crushes his own flesh and bones, becoming the ultimate art piece. The pool that Hrabal's writing swims in is classically harmonic and symphonic. Hrabal is an internal writer whose senses are heightened into deliberate movements, likened to single notes that become chords that become a song."

> "Billie Holiday worked her way into my bloodstream about the same time I discovered the inspirational mixture of caffeine and writing. When Billie sings the blues, you don't just hear her voice; you smell and taste her soul."

> "From the blues to Green on Red, a now-defunct cowpunk-prophetic-garage band that wrote and played intestine-wrapped, cerebral songs complete with the weave of an organ and the whine of lead singer Dan 'Big Daddy' Stuart."

> EYA-Hey Nakoda. "I discovered this Native American group at a powwow in Indio. Their voices and drums transform being human into being all animals, birds, fish, storms, sun, moon and sky."

> Iggy Pop, Raw Power. "Shall we purge in public . . ."

> P.J. Harvey, To Bring You My Love. "P.J.'s dark, heavyset design climbs through swamp-moss vines with monkeys on her back —which she shakes but can't shake off. The weight of her music is offset by simple, trance-inducing hooks. There's a constant music swimming through us all, but we must be still to hear the music of ourselves."