“Spoken Word” (Used 20 times)

Today the U.S. nation celebrates the life and work of prominent civil rights activist, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Here are three speeches by Dr. King hosted by the Free Music Archive. The first is King's infamous "I Have a Dream" speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963.

The second is a speech given January 14, 1968, at a demonstration supporting anti-war activitists, including singer Joan Baez, imprisoned at the Santa Rita Prison in California. The recording of Dr. King's speech was produced by Colin Edwards for KPFA radio the day after the demonstration. (BB1460 Pacifica Radio Archives, CC by-nc-sa)

The third of King's speeches presented here is from March 16, 1968 at the event "Men and women in the arts concerned with Vietnam" in Los Angeles, California. The speech is prefaced by a six-minute introduction by novelist, playwright, and poet James Baldwin. The recording was made in the audience and aired on KPFK on April 4, 1968. (BB4661 Pacifica Radio Archives, CC by-nc-sa)

I like those blackout poems. They are a great way to remix newspapers and other printed stuff. It's Recycle Art and Minimalistic. Anyone can do one. It's easy.

In Holland and Belgium we call them Stiftgedichten.

I did a few myself. And liked it. But somehow last sunday I started thinking about making them differently. Then I thought about adding the things I love: spoken word & music. So *bang* that idea hit me straight away: blackout poems with the text as spoken words by someone and my music to go along with it.

On monday I did one with my daughter's voice. Her name is Puck Raaphorst. I love it. It's also easy to combine both things in a video, see my vimeo.

Kenneth Gaburo looked at language and music and saw enough commonalities and crosstalk to render the distinction inadequate. The two categories of communication and expression are indistinguishable in their root—the voice—and so why bother with reinforcing the divergence?

The two artists added to the FMA this morning—Larry Polansky, a composer/programmer/performer/theorist, and Chris Mann, a composer/poet/performer/linguist—both took different (but clearly related) concepts from Gaburo. Polansky often works on the level of musical systems and probabilities; the example below, "Simple Actions/Rules of Compossibility," is for a performer and computer, but the person controlling the computer has very little involvement in specific events. It is rather the systems that are being controlled, so that the changes are not to the details but rather they are on a higher level. Of course, the changes manifest themselves on the lower level—this is language—and it is these changes that are heard in the recording below. I'm leaving out an absurd amount of information here, but luckily Larry's kind enough to just put many of his recordings up on his site. He also often works with harmonic series-derived tunings, gamelan, and rode the Amiga wave the first time around. 

"Simple Actions/Rules of Compossibility" is presented here in a recording by Larry Polansky and Chris Mann, who reads a part of his long text Tuesday called "Rules of Compossibility." In this, the Amiga is essentially a responsive instrument to the sounds that it takes as input, so Mann's text is treated by the computer as sound. Yet, rather than just sound poetry, concerned with sound as its object (and stripping away a large degree of referential meaning from the text), Mann uses language as the "mechanism whereby you understand what I'm thinking better than I do (where I is defined by those changes for which I is required)." In other words (if it is possible to say the same thing in other words) language does not communicate; language reveals. Mann's text "notes (on the user as software)" is just one of the many hours of recordings he has available on his site. I've featured the first part here, but the whole thing works out to about a half hour.

Larry Polansky and Chris Mann will both be at ISSUE on Tuesday evening to talk about the work of Kenneth Gaburo, and to give performances, along with the composer and theorist David Dunn (who played last night). Facilitating the conversation will be the trumpeter Nate Wooley, so just for fun I've added some of his music to the playlist below.

One of the musical highlights of 2009 for me was seeing the Free Music Archive come to fruition: getting here, playing around, discovering new music and netlabels, and interacting with other users as well.  While it is virtually impossible to pick just a handful of absolute favorites from the almost 15,000 tracks hosted here, I did manage to find some memorable cuts from Year One of the FMA.

Big shouts to KBOO and KEXP for keeping me engaged with some great live recordings, as evidenced by the included pieces from Os Mutantes, Thavius Beck, and Pezzner.  Real and surreal forms of hip-hop weigh in heavily throughout this mix, whether it's the contemplative feel of Just Plain Ant, the beat-centric brilliance of the Custodian of Records, or the out there spaceiness of DJ Ilya Monosov or Anti-Pop Consortium.  Space is saved for Nikki Giovanni to wax poetic on the Reverend Dr. King, and time is allowed for our beloved DJ Donna Summer and his laptop to digitally carve up the "Chicken Dance" (does anyone else miss his Advanced D&D radio show as much as I do?).  And don't sleep on the Error Broadcast netlabel, one of my absolute favorites of 2009.  Shlohmo holds it down for them, closing out the mix in fine form.

You may have noticed the "plus one" within the title of this entry.  That's just me coming up with a good excuse to throw you a bonus track from Just Plain Ant, who is hands down my favorite producer within the Creative Commons realm, a true ambassador of hip-hop's  production and potential.  His Just Plain Sounds netlabel is an unquestionable favorite of mine, bringing the heat with every release.  The attached track below is a 10-minute sampler from a JPS release entitled The New Black, which includes over 30 of Ant's fabulous instrumentals.  Here's hoping that you enjoy the sampler as well as the mix, which you can find after the jump.  The archive is host to a ton of hidden gems, so please feel free to leave comments and let me know what your FMA favorites are...