Music-poems

My Top 5 gigs of all time

John Laidler and I began in 2008 recording partly found/ partly composed poems on piano music with found mashups and various improvisations of music. About John Laidler (of Okapi Guitars)

We have produced one CD 'nine found poems in the shape of a piano' which investigate piano music through poetry. These pieces began as montages found, written and improvised poems investigating piano players or composers for the piano.

Nine found poems in the shape of a piano

Ravel

Satie

Cage

Terezin

Scelsi

Anon

Gould

Bolleter

Piano Tuner

We have made a video for one track Anon.

Piano Man Bolleter

– an extract from Schumann’s Wolf-Lieder stretched mp3

with samples from from Bolleter’s sleeve notes and recording.

Friends visiting Beethoven found ruined pianos, out of tune

strings broken from the pounding as he tried to hear.

He had sawn the legs off one machine to feel the music

with air, using hands to improvise for hours, hearing through his fingers,

his chest, salvaging the earth song . . . lawnmower, dog, siren, wind

and the bubbles popping through the airlock over the lilly pilly wine.

A piano is said to be ruined (rather than neglected or devastated)

when it has been abandoned to all weathers,

say on a sheep station or tennis court, with the result that few

or none of its notes sound like that of an even-tempered uptight piano.

Piano Man Tuner

– soundscape of the art gallery of New South Wales mp3

. . . . I’m trying to listen

to an art gallery - the urinal’s automatic flush, the sound of

roaches en masse, an electronic scratching of chitin carapace

from an installation on the first floor. He sits down

at his site-specific art listening for the harmonics

and starts up an incoming tide of warm arpeggios rippling

over the woman who lies slumped against a tree, tired out,

her child explores her lap, her husband, back to us, puts a billy on to boil.

Birds call account through their solitude ‘On the Wallaby Track’. . . .