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Henri Chopin: Excerpt from “Vibrespace” (1963)
From the album Revue OU (2002)
“Without this machine, sound poetry would not exist.” Thus did the French poet and musician Henri Chopin (1922-2008)—not to be confused with that other Chopin of some musical repute—describe the importance of the tape recorder for his foundational experiments on the borderline between voice and music, first undertaken in the 1950s.
While earlier pioneers of “sound poetry” had explored the artistic possibilities created by breaking down words into their constituent phonemes—the paralinguistic sounds of vowels and consonants—Chopin sought to free poetic practice from its connection to language. Using microphones to capture the sonic minutiae of the human vocal apparatus and tape machines to arrange and alter the resulting sound material, Chopin created a new genre of acoustic art he called the audio-poème. Through the encounter between the primordial musical technology of the voice and modern means of recording and manipulation, we hear the human body as an instrument of unlimited potential—in Chopin’s words, a “sound factory.”
This example of Chopin’s work is taken from a wonderful compilation of recordings originally included with the magazine Revue OU, which Chopin edited from 1964 to 1974. It features performances by sound poetry luminaries such as François Dufrêne, Bob Cobbing, Raoul Hausmann, Brion Gysin, and many more.
More of Chopin’s recordings can be found on UbuWeb.
Played 40 time(s).
July 05, 2011, 8:00am
