bpNichol: a tribute album

Every time I’m asked about which writers have been an influence on me, I cite bpNichol. I was an undergrad at York University in the mid-80s studying music and taking some writing clases. In my first year, when my favourite writer was Seamus Heaney, I took a poetry workshop with bp. He entirely blew my mind—he caught “the heart [and mind] off guard and [blew] it open.” He introduced me to a new world of contemporary writing, not only his own work, but the vital and exciting exploratory work of contemporary Canada and beyond.

And more than that, he was a model of what a writer could be: curious, community-oriented, involved in everything (visual, sonic and other poetries, digital and computer work publishing, small press, fiction, comics, music, mentoring, children’s writing, playwrighting, collaborating, organizing…) and supportive and generous to everyone. I hadn’t really considered feminism but he brought in some small press periodicals (which I noted he was mentioned on the masthead as a supporter) with work such as Nicole Brossard included.

Without exaggeration, he changed the course of my life. Though I’d been interested in experimental music, I hadn’t thought of literature in this way. I learned from his model of generosity, community-involvement, mentorship, and curiosity. I didn’t know what a writer, musician or creative person might look like, beyond the “great man” tropes. I have aspired to be the kind of writer and creator that bp was—omniverious, curious, supportive, productive, unpretentious and entirely open to the possibilities of creativity.

Last year, bp would have turned 80 and I finally finished an ongoing tribute project, using archival recordings of his performances to make new work. The result is my album I after H: music after bpNichol.

In April this year, Jason Camlot and Kathryn Macleod devoted an entire SONIC LIT: a spoken web radio show to the album. I was completed thrilled. They played the album and parts of a conference presentation from some years ago where I spoke about the creation and source of some of the work and they provided their own insights and commentary. Here’s the link to the podcast: Sonic Lit

I thought I’d share my entire conference talk and the complete album.

From Archive to Newhive: Using historical recordings to create H for it is a pleasure and a surprise to breathe

In much of his work, bpNichol explores the relationship of the body to language.

Not only the phonic and textual reality of the poem (“speech: each to eech”) but the physical embodiment of writing (“What is a poem is inside of your body.”)

bpNichol’s physical presence as mediated through his visual image, his scraggly hair and blue velour smock, as well as, most importantly, his recorded voice, have become iconic. Indeed one could say that in some respects, the man himself has become an aspect of the work, or at least, an aspect of the reception of the work. There’s a story that faced with an inattentive audience of drinkers interrupting a poetry reading at the Brunswick Tavern in Toronto, he chanted, “Hey! Hey! Steer clear! Don’t you be no cultural hero!” But, today, Nichol has become that cultural hero. Hence the T-shirt I am wearing today: “What would bp do?”

It’s been almost thirty years since Barrie Nichol died. The text which was bpNichol and which is bpNichol’s work continues to have a presence through his innumerable publications and recordings. Some of these are commercially available but many are only readily accessible through a variety of archives or online sources. This includes many recordings of live performances which are only available in such online sites as: UbuWeb, PennSound, and the soon-to-be-relaunched bpNichol.ca.

Upon encountering the archival recordings of bpNichol reading and performing, I became interested in how this iconic work (and his iconic voice) could be explored by artistic creators in addition to scholars. I was especially interested in the unreleased recordings of readings, rich in paratextual details and a sense of occasion.

And so, over the last year or so, I have been developing H: for it is a pleasure and a surprise to breathe, an extended multimedia piece inspired by bpNichol’s practice of borderblur: his enthusiastic engagement with heterogeneous forms. I’ve used the archival recordings as source material for computer manipulation and have integrated them with new audio, textual, and visual work written and performed by me.

In writing, H, I considered how newly written work could be used both to artistically explore aspects of bpNichol’s oeuvre as well as his manner of performance and even the nature of the recordings. These archival recordings could be used as the building blocks of new work, work that addresses and further explores his concerns, particularly with notions of identity, performance, breath and the body. I knew that there would be something viscerally powerfully about using the actual recordings and the recognizable sound of an iconic and much loved writer’s voice.

I wondered about the notion of the post lyric self. In what way are these phonotexts when used as ‘raw material,’ separate from human identity, the wizard of self that we imagine behind the curtain of the recording? And what about my own embodiment when I perform with these recordings? If I perform live or mix recordings of myself with these sources, do bp and I exist in the same dimension or do we each exist in our individual Cloudtowns?

In this talk, I’d like to demonstrate and discuss some different approaches that I’ve taken with the archival source material when creating H: for it is a pleasure and a surprise to breathe and what questions I think that these may raise.

WHAT IS A POEM IS OF INSIDE YOUR…

In working with the source recordings, I’ve been thinking about what Steve Evans in a recent article in Amodern, refers to as “phonotextuality, or how timbre, text, and technology braid together in the phonotext.”[1]

Text and technology are perhaps sufficiently clear as terms, but it’s worth repeating what Evans writes about the third term, “timbre.” In his Jacket2 commentary series, “The Phonotextual Braid,” Evans, says that he uses the term “timbre”

to organize a set of reflections on “the voice” as it is encountered in recorded poetry… the voice as a sign that indexes — before, alongside of, and beyond other meaning-making — the condition and situation of the body that produces it…. hear[ing] “voice” as rhyming with “noise,” specifically the noise emitted by the human animal situated somewhere along its trajectory toward death, in a condition of finitude[.]

In bp’s particular case, the “trajectory toward death,” and the “condition and situation of the body” are particularly present in the mind of the listener, considering the tragic and near-Martyrological fact of his early passing. Further, since one of my central themes in H is “breath,” and, as you’ll hear, I’ve used specific breath sounds in isolation, we are reminded of the physicality and sound that life makes.

BREEEEEETHING

bpNichol’s sound poem, Beast (“I dreamed I saw Hugo Ball”) was released in 1971 on the cassette titled bpNichol. In this recording, the characteristics of a nonprofessionally trained voice are apparent: the slightly off intonation, the physical strain that can be heard in the breathing. The timbre of Nichol’s voice reflects “the condition and situation of the body that produces it,” to recall Evan’s phrase.

There is a moment in Beast where Nichol chants the word “breathing” several times. I took a single iteration of that word “breathing” and time-stretched it, extending it as if Nichol had more than human lung capacity. Breeeeeeeth-ing. The default assumption when beginning to listen to my piece is that this is a recording of the man, bpNichol. A kind of suspense occurs. How long can bpNichol hold this note? At some point, the listener begins to realize that this isn’t a recording of an actual human performance, that this isn’t realism, but rather perhaps, magic realism. A mythic breath like that of Palongawhoya who “made the whole world an instrument of sound.”[2] The listener balances the reality of human lung capacity with the trickery of artifice. Then another kind of suspense happens. How long will this go on for? How long can the composer sustain this kind of exhalation ad absurdum? This has become about sound and not words, the form is psychological and is based on the listener’s response. And what began as a representation of a human sound becomes something else. Something like the body but not. Something like bpNichol’s voice but not. And then the sustained breeeee- ends with an –ing. The sound object has been verbed. Has returned to the original human script. Now we can all breathe a sign of relief. A realistic sigh.

(The beginning of this track is “Breeeeeeething.”)

BPOME BIOME

Another approach to the use of source text can be found in my piece, “bpome biome,” which uses an almost complete and unmodified recording of bp’s “Pome Poem.” This sound poem was released on bpNichol’s 1982 cassette, Ear Rational but was recorded ten years earlier. The original is already an archive. This poem is the one which begins, “What is a poem is inside of your body, body, body…”

In terms of timbre, it is apparent how young and fresh sounding the 28-year-old bp was. And there’s an earnestness to the voice, the text, and to the performance. And bp’s poem addresses embodiment in a very sing-song way. A simple nursery-rhyme-like melody and rhythm. In my setting of the piece, I chose to preserve this aspect of the original, though I cut the text after the last repetition of “What is a poem is inside of your body.” To me, the next bit, “What is a poem is inside of your happy,” seemed a bit datedly earnest. But then again, the very simplicity, the childlike innocence of bp’s entire poem, and particularly the “happy, happy, happy,” comes out of a counterculture that deliberately deployed earnestness against a hegemony that was perceived as ruthlessly cynical. Innocence, earnestness and inclusivity were not symptoms of naiveté but sources of power that had to be worked towards & even fought hard for. The flower inserted in the barrel of a gun. Using source material from a different cultural moment to make effective contemporary art requires that one reconsider how the original reads in the contemporary world and how it might have read in its own time. My musical additions are perhaps a framing device that causes the listener to consider these issues.

Against the skipping-game-rhyme regularity of bp’s text, I have added some highly syncopated elements. The dull thud of a drum and a variety of atonal piano punctuations. The body lurches, staggers, fights off outside forces. Is aware of itself as temporally contingent. In some places, the drum aligns with a particular noun. The body. Or the heart.

In counterpoint to the simple diatonic tune, I have added snaking atonal melodies and dissonant chordal shots. Against the near kidlit chant, I’ve counterpoised a more aggressive contemporary art music ensemble.

Just as we are aware that this piece takes a classic performance by an iconic figure and collages it with new contrasting musical material, so we are aware of the interplay of two different parallel worlds. The interplay both ‘makes strange’ the original, allowing us to hear it anew, but also makes apparent its defining characteristics, and uses it as a single coherent element, a found object, perhaps.

PLAY:

H: TRILOGY

In several of the pieces in H, I’ve used recordings from different original performances, sometimes separated by more than a decade. This flattens out the temporal context but also the context of where the recording was made and for what reason. Was it a commercial recording or a performance recording? What about the audience? The recording of the voice, the phonotext, becomes another virtual instrument, another sample, in my digital orchestra. Perhaps this very flattening of context has the effect of foregrounding the embodiment of the voice, the context of the recording.

As I mentioned, in the source material, particularly when contrasted with the new digital material, the quality of the recording, the particular characteristics of the recording or how it has been degraded over time is frequently apparent. A characteristic tape hiss, noise, EQ, or even the deficiencies in the recording. These particular sounds are well known to us if not from the specific recording, then at least from the era, and so this aural presence evokes a particular cultural moment.

In the newly created pieces, the contrast of the contemporary digital manipulation and processing with the lo-fi technology embodied in the source material becomes a kind of pas de deux between technologies in time. In a moment, I’ll play an example from my piece, “In Syst” based on recordings from bp’s “Incest Song.” You can hear how the original recording of the hissing ‘s’ sounds exceeds the microphone’s capacity and distorts.

One major approach to the archival material which I haven’t yet addressed is the atomizing of components of the original. In several pieces I isolate individual phonemes or other sounds and use them in different ways: whether to construct rhythmic patterns, create a variety of polyphonic textures, or to combine them so that they begin to resemble words.

In addition to virtual instruments, in “Turnips a Door,” I work primarily with recordings of “Historical Implications of Turnips” from bp’s 1968 recording Motherlove and “a small song that is his” from the 1971 cassette, bpNichol.

As you can see from the visual, “Historical Implications of Turnips” permutes the letters of “turnip” to form words or near words. The second column (“are”) remains the same. “a small song that is his” also operates on the level of the letter, and much of the poem uses the sounds of individual letter names. (“f f f”) Both texts work with sounds as a central organizing principle and not semantics.

In my piece, I pay attention to the vocal quality of the elements. The softer, more soothing pronunciation of “door,” the harsher “ar” and the quick hiss of the “s.” I recombine the individual letter sounds to create new rhythms. I arrange the phonemes so that in some places they almost come together into lexical units. I see my approach as investigating—commenting on, perhaps—the varying timbres of bp’s voice and how he combines sounds and rhythms to create his poems. I think that here, too, there is an exploration of the embodiment or projection of the individual, of the lyric self in sound and more specifically in sound recording.

There is also a quick fluttering sound which is a noise artifact that I mined from the source recording. Or perhaps it is a sound made by Barrie Nichol. As I’ve said, I’m exploring not only the performance by an author but also its recording.

The piece “Turnips a Door” transitions into “In Syst,” which uses the distorting hissing and breath sounds of bp’s “Incest Song” along with recordings of live flute and saxophone as well as digital instruments.

You can hear all of this— “a door” mixed in with elements from “Turnips” as well as the breathing sounds—from about 2’35’

I think its interested that I’m asserting that all these vocal sounds are from a bp recording (which they are). Even if they are not recognizable as such, it changes their meaning. It is part of Evan’s “Phonotextual braid.”

I usually perform these pieces with my own live voice superimposed, intertwining my own similar vocal sounds with those of bp’s. Am I Natalie Cole singing with the recorded voice of her father, Nat King Cole? Or is what I’m doing more akin to a hip hop artist sampling other artist’s work?

In some performances, I use live digital processing of my own vocals which further obfuscates the boundaries between live and recorded, body and technology. There is also another category of work that I do with these bp recordings. I have many samples which I mix and process live like a DJ. These samples are from a wide variety of sources: from readings of all parts of The Martyrology to a variety of recordings of bp’s sound work.

THE PHONOTEXTUAL BRAND

So: When I cut and paste, am I creating a portrait of bp and his work? Am I cut and pasting Nichol’s embodied body, the Nichol “brand” or only the recorded representation of that brand? Am I cut and pasting the particular sound of a particular time period?

Incidentally, before I began working on these recordings, I did secure permission from Ellie Nichol, who hold the rights for the bpNichol estate.

I’d like to finish by playing a video entitled “Eye Drum.” The video uses audio samples from bp’s performance of his “Dada Lama” (the “eee-ah” sounds) along with a recording of the electromagnetic sounds from last years recent comet landing. In this video, I wanted to explore how the visual rhythms could engage as an equal rhythmic partner in polyphony with the audio.

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[1] http://amodern.net/article/beyond-text/

[2] The Martyrology 1.