Ķæ p. Rujhaan – Northern Flicker [CS]

"# ++Kæ P. Rujhaan++
## *Northern Flicker*

“Northern Flickers are large, brown woodpeckers with a gentle expression… Although it can climb up the trunks of trees and hammer on wood like other woodpeckers, the Northern Flicker prefers to find food on the ground. Ants are its main food, and the flicker digs in the dirt to find them…”
- Allaboutbirds.com

It is also in this way; I chose to dig up memories and moments of past. A vast array of field recordings buried deep in the Yakima soil - only to be reclaimed years down the worn out dirt road. A hazy collage of found sounds dug up from field recordings of a distant past collected on handheld tape recorders; as well as found audio collages salvaged from 8mm family home video tapes captured almost 30 years ago…spliced together with traditional and non-traditional instrumentation alike. Scattered and stitched into the static of Shortwave radio transmissions and the natural industrial drones of microtonal sounds summoned from a wide array of cheap broken instruments and natural artifacts. Bowed jawbones or a cracked and chipped cymbal against the backdrop of a woodpecker birdsong and wind-organ…an orchestra of gasoline powered chainsaws sing amphetamine fueled small town-blue-collar love songs while dismantling a felled 200+ year old dead oak tree in the Pacific Northwest…an antique metal alarm clock scraping against a rusty bicycle rim, refusing to tell time apart from spit-shining-shit & profanity into an Oil Can Delay unit. Elementary symphonic naivety; an offering of slightly out-oftune efforts against the natural acoustics and frigid reverberations of early morning Colorado ice rinks straight to tape - freshly sharpened hockey skates scraping against a sheet of ice at 5am….or the dull & boring or schizophrenic haunting sounds of a lonely office. The blistered and bleeding cubicle…an air conditioned nightmare.

All of this betrays any initial impression left in my minds-eye. An intentional benediction, a
crucifixion of the ego…obliterating the objective self.
Bathing in the light of the subconscious…
Digging in the dirt like the Northern Flicker itself.
Crush your local curator. Trample the Noise elite; Hurdle the Experimentally dead. Kill your(sense
of)self.

- Ķæ P. Rujhaan
Yakama Nation, Washington - 2026

Field recordings, bowed cymbals, tam-tam, jawbone, woodchimes, Norske wind organ, shortwave radio transmissions, lost/found sounds & source material; collected and composed on various handheld devices and a Nagra E Mono 1/4” tape machine; from August of 2022 through
October of 2025 in Tacoma & Yakima, Washington."

Tailnia, 2026