Brandon LaBelle + Christof Migone – Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language
The publisher of the book Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language, Errant Bodies Press, describes it as “an anthology focusing on the relationship of language to sound, writing to music, bringing together a highly diverse collection of essays, interviews, meditations, visual projects, text-sound scores and audio by some of the leading individuals in the field of cultural and performance studies, experimental music and contemporary art.”
I, on the other hand, would describe this book as a mixed box of candy, containing some yummy surprises and some yucky gunk. Unfortunately, a lot of the book is comprised of stuffy essays by academic types that are nearly impenetrable to the layman. They’re just chock-full of big, obscure words that obfuscate the point, which is a shame, when simpler words would have got said point across to more people. Also, references to obscure texts and authors (along with a few visual artists and musicians) abound with no background info on most of them. Both of these problems create a perfect recipe to leave the general reader completely in the dark.
Fortunately, a few rays of light shine through in the form of GX-Jupitter Larsen’s short piece on noise music, Lionel Marchetti’s impassioned and poetic words on the works of electro-acoustic composer Michel Chion, Vito Acconci’s probing and unsettling text / video piece “Bodybuilding in the Great Northwest,” Alvin Lucier’s voice and synthesizer work “The Duke of York” (which includes a long interview that explains the piece in detail), and a long interview with Robert Ashley about how he composes his spoken word operas.
Publisher: Errant Bodies Press ISBN: 978-0965557030 Format: Book + CD Binding: Softcover Page count: 284 pages Country: Germany Published: 2001 More: Errant Bodies Press
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