The formal definition of sound poetry as a genre has always been loose and flexible, but its lineages (Dada, Fluxus), composer/performers (Ball, Schwitters, Ashley, Higgins, Blonk, Chopin), and relations to other experimental media (concrete poetry, visual poetry) are well established. This column aims to cover both music that comes out of this tradition as well as adjacent forms: poetry proper, spoken word, experimental vocal music, vocal improvisation—anything where the timbres and sonorities of the unpitched human voice hold the spotlight. Below are eight of the best sound poetry releases from this past December and January that Bandcamp has to offer.
c.haxholm
Skuffende Attituder
Claus Haxholm’s Spricht Editions is one of the only labels dedicated solely to experimental vocal music, making sound poetry a constant on its roster. Haxholm’s latest is a set of brief “recordings from a drawer, in a hotel room,” and you can feel the confines of the recording space in the sound. Just about every noise from Haxholm’s mouth clips the audio and the consequently compressed bandwidth and flattened textures translate the mouth noises into erratic rhythms that evoke rudimentary electronic synthesis, thereby transforming the microphone into a versatile percussive instrument.
Guido Gamboa
Left-Handed Club
Compact Disc (CD)
Guido Gamboa is a sound collagist of rare caliber, capable of creating immersive depth in his work by letting each sonic element take up a healthy amount of space and then run its due course, rather than layering it all into a smother. On Left-Handed Club, he takes texts by various lefties of historical note (painters, psychologists, composers, etc.) as his compositional throughline, using the random genetic distribution of left-handedness as a chance operation of sorts—the same way Cage might ask a performer to tune in to a random radio station, for example. Each text has a different reader, and each pairing of text and reader feels apposite: poetic descriptions of landscape are read in a rich baritone; analytic expositions of behaviorism are delivered in the cold valence of text-to-speech. Some readings are even pitch-shifted (or otherwise distorted) to the point where they become part of the broader collage.
Lambkin, Walker, & Harrison
Lambkin / Walker / Harrison
Cassette
Regional Bears has released two compilations in the past few years that showcase a broad spectrum of contemporary artists invested in the limits and possibilities of the recorded voice; this new short split tape showcases some of the most visible sound poets working today. Lambkin is famous both for his past life as a member of The Shadow Ring and as a sound artist prominent for his solo work, his collaborations (with Jason Lescalleet, Joe McPhee, and others, often via Erstwhile Records), and the Kye label that he ran from 2001 to 2017. On “Preparation for Concrete Voice,” he heaves in oscillating exhalations that gradually fall in tone until he runs out of breath and starts over, exhibiting a trademark blend of shamanic charisma and off-kilter humor. Duncan Harrison, a mainstay of the experimental music community surrounding London’s Cafe OTO, brings a similar energy on “Brightonian Vistas,” where he recites variations of “[insert nation here] webspace” over and over with a droll spite that, in a Beckettian way, both chafes against and comically supports the inherent absurdity of what he’s saying.
Mitei Narico
桑井ゆた 心の音
Mitei Narico reads his poetry on 桑井ゆた 心の音 with a light breath and plenty of pauses, giving each line time to wisp into the air before moving on to the next. Each straight-ahead reading has an accompanying “demolition and reconstruction” that iterates upon the former in some way; despite the description, these remixes tend to preserve their sources’s negative space and ambience, employing a range of simple effects (mostly pitch-shifting and delay) as well as subtle electronic sounds with an unwavering restraint. They feel like short electroacoustic improvisations built on the skeletons the words provide, priming the listener to hear many other possibilities for manipulation in the unembellished original.
Wladimir Schall
Urusonēto
Vinyl LP
Wladimir Schall‘s latest record riffs on the ur-classic of sound poetry, Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate, by using the Japanese voice of Google Translate to perform the text. The conflict that makes this recording so fun and generative lies not only in between German and Japanese phonology, but also in the text-to-speech software’s algorithmic (mis)readings—all on top of the many ambiguous correlations between an unconventional text and its phonetic realization that make every interpretation of the score different, no matter the performer. It bears comparison to Nick Hoffman’s Parallel Bars, which uses Vocaloid and synth oscillators in its renditions of various 16th to 18th century composers’ work.
T.D.
Mouth Music
Cassette
Last year, T.D. (aka Thomas DeAngelo) released Voiceprints & Aircuts: Sound Poetry by Other Means—easily the best album of 2023 in the genre. Mouth Music’s liner notes describe it as a “burly, fully-in-the-red coda” to that record; they also cite Robert Ashley’s “Wolfman” and Henri Chopin’s “Vibrespace” as influences. In the same manner that Voiceprints & Aircuts makes use of the techniques of old-school sound poetry (guttural vocals, mixed-fidelity recording, voice filtering and splicing reminiscent of tape music, etc.), Mouth Music draws from a long tradition of DIY noise that relies on crude and broken analog processing to transform any and all sonic inputs into a caterwauling wall of feedback. But the wall isn’t so thick or homogenous as to mask the way in which T.D.’s oral calisthenics trigger and shape the noise.
Thollem, Terry Riley, & Nels Cline
The Light Is Real
Vinyl LP
There are certain musicians who seem to be able to get a confusingly diverse set of big names on board any given project and make it work; Kevin Martin and Thollem are two who immediately come to mind. On The Light Is Real, Thollem joins forces with Terry Riley and Nels Cline for an album where cascading waves of nonsense syllables (à la Jaap Blonk) dovetail with a carnival of instrumentation that sputters along in imitation. At one point, Cline speaks in dialogue with the vocal babble by way of atonal electric guitar freakouts in a brief but brilliant passage on side B.
Eric Wong & Yan Jun
Dichotomic Language
Yan Jun is a founding figure of Beijing’s experimental scene, important both for his own music and for running the Sub Jam label since 2000; high-pitched sine waves and voice are some of the most consistent elements of his work (including his best album, aptly titled 7 Poems and Some Tinnitus). These elements also form the bedrock of Dichotomic Language, whose title is equally apropos: there’s a conversational air to the music that, while sometimes manifesting as playful mimicry between Eric Wong‘s sine waves and Yan Jun’s vocals, just as often shows itself through counterpoint—for example, when Yan sings from the back of his throat with a fry-prone instability that contrasts hilariously with the calm stasis of Wong’s electronics.
