Written by: Dave Cantrell
Language is its own thing, it has its own relationships, lives its own life. Its variants, its wild potentials, the very adventures hiding inside its skin, restless but sure, knowing that its own contours can – which is to say ‘will’ – always change, brandishing its restlessness like a seductive, irresistible foil, written like blood, spoken like soul, there is nothing it can do to stop itself from proving there’s nothing it can’t do. Language rules your breath, lives inside your silences like the heart inside the chest, uneasy to the core until come the day it can say no more. Just ask David Allen Goldberg.
Described in his bio as a “multidisciplinary artist, poet, singer-songwriter, and visual creator,” Goldberg has been a crucial mainstay of the always-thriving New York City arts scene for some thirty-plus years, having teamed up with the formidable David Siskovic (aka Sisko) almost immediately upon crossing that city’s limits in the mid-to-late 90s where they wasted little time in creating the short-lived but scene-essential Disco Pusher as well as beginning a still-thriving partnership creating material for a wide range of fellow artists from Toots Hibbert to Sandflower. Among those in said scene that quickly took notice of Goldberg’s core potential was a certain Allen Ginsberg, working alongside the unparalleled Beat titan while of course continuing to write while also producing a fairly prodigious amount of visual work that has found a place to hang on such renowned walls as those inside Aaron Rose’s legendary Alleged Gallery while also being added to Stanford’s permanent collection. And now, as if destined, Goldberg’s non-more-essential work finds its way into the audio realm where, by anyone’s reckoning, it has long belonged.
Drawing from the rich underground traditions wherein jazz and poetry were, like the instant twins they destined to be, enmeshed into the downtown NYC milieu of the late 20th C. that would birth the historic Nuyorican movement, we arrive at the, umm, arrival of Trap Poems, a full-length adventure into Goldberg’s work that could rightfully be termed ‘incomparable’ and that we’re beyond proud to present a taste of that forthcoming full-length (self-released and arriving April 3rd). Lush like a spell of dark, soulful, deeply urban enchantment, mystery and longing foraging through the historic remnants of the Beat-born eternal, “Chill,” with a preternatural ease that feels instinctual down to the bone. pulls one without resistance into the very bloodstream of its own restless soul. For this writer, it’s difficult to remember having premiered a more, well, human example of what the human heart is capable of, which, I must say, brings an almost incomparable joy. Art lives, no matter…[find your copy here]
