Aahs and Ewws and Ahhs

Two nights ago, just before I had to pick my daughter up at the train station, I attended a little sound poetry concert at Red Square in Albany, New York. The event bore little resemblance to my expectations. First, I thought I was in store for a reading by Michael Basinski, a well known visual and sound poet from Buffalo, New York. Instead, the whole Buffluxus sound poetry ensemble (in its current iteration) showed up, including Chris Fritton, whom I hadn’t seen since last year. Second, there was an opening act. Since sound poetry pushes poetry towards song (or, at least, something songlike), purveyors of sound poetry are apt to take on the trappings of concerts, so this show included an opening act, the first performance of the Jackson Mac Low Choir.

Headed up by Don Byrd, the Jackson Mac Low Choir performed two of Mac Low’s sound pieces, “Dream Meditation Vocabulary” and “Gatha for Pete Rose.” The troupe included Byrd, Michael Peters, Michael Jonik, a man named Sam (whose last name I apologize for forgetting), and a woman whose name I don’t know. Using copies of Mac Low’s sound poetry scores, the group carefully melded their very different voices and modulations into a single sonic whole, not harmonic but symbiotic.

“Dream Meditation Vocabulary,” The Jackson Mac Low Choir, Red Square, Albany, New York (31 Mar 2006)
Michael Peters (almost invisible in the dark), Michael Jonik, unknown woman, Don Byrd, and Sam
In this too-short clip, you can gather the variation of the performers’ voices, but you will gain little insight (inhearing) into the manner in which their voices interwove during the performance. What is clear, if barely, is how important the female voice is in this performance, allowing as it does for a greater range of sound (and octave).


“Gatha for Pete Rose,” The Jackson Mac Low Choir, Red Square, Albany, New York
Michael Peters (almost invisible in the dark), Michael Jonik, unknown woman, Don Byrd, Matt Chambers, Chris Fritton, and Sam
In the middle of the Choir’s final piece, members of Buffluxus jumped on the stage and joined in. Still, the mixing of voices—gruff and sweet, high and low, bark and moan—is clearly present in this clip.

The low-quality video I’m presenting tonight does little service for these pieces. Sitting in the front of the audience but using a cheap digital camera, I captured these images as well as I could, but the inevitable problem with parallax kept every scene from being reasonably framed. The images sometimes float in and out of focus as my hand jiggles the lens from place to place and the camera’s eye searches for something to focus on. The lighting for this little show was adequate for humans, but less than so for the camera I had (which has had the effect of excising Michael Peters from every shot, as if he were an ostracized member of the Communist party). Worst of all, almost all of these clips are too short. I feared I’d run out of memory capturing these, so I skimped a little too much.

The obvious head of Buffluxus was Michael Basinski, though the focal point of the group changed during the course of each of their songs. Joined by Don Metz, Doug Manson, Chris Fritton, and Matt Chambers, Basinski presented a fairly wide range of sound poetry styles.


“Sound Poem 1,” Buffluxus, Red Square, Albany, New York (31 Mar 2006)
(Michael Basinski [virtually invisible], Douglas Manson, Matt Chambers, Chris Fritton, and Don Metz)
The first two poems focused on studies of sound. “Homage to Hedgehog Mushrooms” was followed quickly by “Sound Poem 1,” which examined how various changes of tone can produce various meanings, even if the consonants and vowels in the words remain the same. Much of “Sound Poem 1” moved through various aural manifestations of “aah,” “eww,” and “ahh,” sounds that by themselves are almost identical. The clip includes a snippet from near the end of the piece, after the initial contrasting of identical words resolves itself into a medley of oral sound scales. What this clip doesn’t present is evidence of the importance of Don Metz’ guitar work in this and a few other pieces. In the midst of essentially a traditional avant-garde sound poetry performance—where the members of Buffluxus fiddled with a cacophony of mouth sounds—it was the simple melodic plucking of Metz’ guitar (in a style more likely from traditional singer-songwriter music-making) that held the pieces together. The voice performers sang-spoke like bright-colored macaws in the clerestory windows of a jungle—each concerned with his own voice—but the river rushing beneath those rising voices was the guitar of Don Metz, which surely moved the voices along, directed them towards a bigger place.

After this songpoem, Buffluxus went for comic relief. The next poem was “Thirty-Nine Different Words for Snow” (which gained its name from what Geoffrey Pullum calls “the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax,” the idea that there are a finite and countable number of words for “snow” in the agglutinative language of the Inuit). “Snow” is a catalog poem, most of which consists of speakers declaiming the imagined names for different types of snow: “walrus balls,” “seal pee,” “table made of ice,” “tundra turd,” “this little belly,” “sperm from masturbating Santa,” etc. Near the end of the performance, Basinski, armed with a stentorian voice, abandoned his microphone and walked through the audience, where he performed at specific individuals.

“Snow” was followed by “Shit Piece,” another comic relief piece, but one that had more the quality of a playlet than a song (or even a poem). This time the performers speak to one another, always using the word “shit” in one way or another. Don Metz was awarded the honor of speaking the self-referential line designed to undermine the performance itself: “Hey, hey, this is not poetry; it’s shit!”


“Mule Car,” Buffluxus, Red Square, Albany, New York (31 Mar 2006)
(Michael Basinski, Matt Chambers, and Chris Fritton
The fifth poem in the set is the only one that Basinski didn’t introduce, but I must assume that its title is “Mule Car,” since that is the phrase most used in the performance. With only three of the members performing it, this poem depended on an ostinato repetition of the phrase “mule car” by Basinski counterpointed by Chambers and Fritton, who also had to use “mule car” fairly frequently. Unlike most of the pieces that evening, “Mule Car” uses only (or primarily) “real” words, rather than invented word or wordless sounds like trills or labial pops or glottal clicks.


“Fungini,” Buffluxus, Red Square, Albany, New York
(Michael Basinski [invisible], Douglas Manson, Matt Chambers, Chris Fritton, and Don Metz)
The piece that ended the night was the longest, and it was the one that brought the audience to a thunderclap of applause. “Funginii,” which Basinski described as “part-fungus, part-genie,” exists in different manifestations: as a six-page performance score filled with words, half-words, unpronounceable “text,” and wordic scribblings; as forty-minute performance available on CD; and as the 20-or-so-minute performance that disappeared last Friday into our memories. The script for the poem itself is itself a chaotic four-columned text: phrases that don’t hold together long enough to make sense, scads of almost-meaningful wordlings, glyphic text that burrows across the columns—and all of this is covered with scribbled notes, arrows, and other markings meant to direct the performance.


Michael Basinski, Performance Script for “Funginii” (Mar 2006)
And perform they did. “Funginii” was the tightest piece of the night. The members of Buffluxus spoke and chanted and strummed in and out of each others’ sonic emanations, holding the audience together almost as well as Metz’ guitar playing did. In the clip above, the Glass-like mesmery of the guitar glues together the pieces of the poem, and Fritton’s voice (“’Twould, tee-oww, tee-oww, tee-oww”) sails over, but on, the music.


“Fungini,” Buffluxus, featuring Douglas Manson, Red Square, Albany, New York
Almost at the end of “Funginii,” Manson takes the guitar for the first time, and he alone performs. This little set-piece in the middle of this wide-ranging poem ranges widely itself. It includes nonsense words, alinguistic sounds, clearly understandable phrases that never add up to sentences, sung words, words that break out of the rhythm of the tune, grunts, and howls—all to a guitar tune that would find itself at home in the quaint world of folk rock.

All of which is to say it was a great night filled with remarkable performances. I have few expectations for sound poetry much of the time, but these performances showed something of the range of the form, proved to me the possibilities that we all hope for.

ecr. l’inf.