Showing posts with label performance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label performance. Show all posts

2022-03-16

Do you have the ticket / we all are always never going home

I have two poems We all are always never going home and Girl with degenerate matter earring in Corporeal, and another in their sibling publication En*gendered, so I recorded this performance of one from each...






Nonbinary bus image from:
libragender on tumblr

Featuring bus and bus station sound clips from:
Julien Matthey, abrahemp, and Ubehag on Freesound

2018-05-12

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Postscript...

Hi all,

Sorry I disappeared without a word before the end of NaPiWriMo.  The explanation is that I was just running a bit late, but still planning to do the last five days...  However life caught up with me and it never happened.  As a goodbye, I just want to post this which wasn't part of NaPoWriMo but which I created in the Nov/Dec/Jan just gone.  I'm rather proud of it and I hope it might encourage others to greater efforts in the areas of recording and audio editing their poems.

I entirely did this using the kindness of friends and freely available free tools, the total production costs were £0.00 ($0.00 at the current exchange rate...)  If anybody wants to discuss how it was done please contact me...

NaPoWriMo has, as ever, been glorious and thank you to all who created prompts, read poems, wrote poems, set up discussion groups etc etc and so on...

You are all stars!

Love,

Ian



New Muses for a Posthuman Age



(Original link with credits...)


2018-01-30

New Muses for a Posthuman Age



New Muses for a Posthuman Age








I follow a filk singer/songwriter called Dr Mary Crowell and on her album: Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour she has a song: Courting My Muse.  This track inspired me to write a sonnet sequence about how the Muses might be updated for the 21st century.

So far, so good, nothing unusual there, I've written sonnet sequences before...

...however when I came to record this, I had a problem.  Muses are female and plural, where I am male and singular.  So I hatched a plan.  I put out a call to various female poetry friends asking them whether they would like to be one of my Muses (I phrased it a little more carefully than that.)

To my delight friends signed up in sufficient numbers to be able to record all nine Muses, plus a group effort for my bonus "Omnes" sonnet that rounds things off at the end, and I was doubly delighted when Mary Crowell leapt at the opportunity to participate (bringing the whole thing full circle...)

I've spent some time editing these together with sound effects and music to complement the poems.  I also recorded myself narrating between the various goddesses in my guise as "The Mortal".

I have to say I'm very pleased with the result.  There's something uniquely satisfying in hearing talented voices read your work back to you, and it also is also educational, bringing out things in the poems that wouldn't be there in my reading.



Cast in order of appearance:

The Mortal
A man, like any other...
Ian Badcoe
This is my blog you are already reading...
Facebook
Twitter

Calliope
Goddess of Complex Computation and Difficult Projects
Natalie Shaw
Natalie Shaw is a poet who also works for the Government Digital Service. She is @redbaronski on Twitter and writes very occasionally on her blog: https://natalieshawpoems.wordpress.com/

Clio
OMG of Celebrity Gossip and Fan-fic
N Magennis
N Magennis is an author and artist. She lives in Argyll. https://nikkimagennis.com/

Euterpe
Rock Goddess
Amy Kinsman
Amy Kinsman is a poet and playwright from Manchester, England. As well as being the founding editor of Riggwelter Press, they are associate editor of Three Drops From A Cauldron and the host of the regular Sheffield-based open mic, Gorilla Poetry. Their debut poetry pamphlet & was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2017 and is due out in April this year.
Facebook
Twitter: @manykinsmen

Erato
Goddess of Personal Development and Self Image
Juliet Anthill
Juliet Antill lives on the Isle of Mull with a SORN'd Fiat Punto and a cat called Alice. She has poems coming out in Magma and Prole this Spring.

Melpomene
Goddess of Heartbreaking News
Dr Mary Crowell
Dr. Mary Crowell is a geeky musician from north Alabama who is very active in the filk community. Her doctorate is in music composition, and she teaches music theory, composition, music appreciation, and piano at a local community college as well as at her home studio. Mary loves to write songs about mythology, gaming, coffee, beagles, and zombies. You can find her gaming album Acolytes of the Machine & Other Gaming Stories (2012) on Pandora Radio. Her latest album (funded by Kickstarter) is Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour (2017).
Patreon
http://marycrowell.com/

Terpsichore
Goddess of Body Modification and Bionics
Jenn Zed (Cyborg Edition)
Ms. Zed is an artist and writer who lives in Bath, England, with her cat. You can view her Portfolio at https://jennzedblog.wordpress.com/

Thallia
Goddess of Lies we tell Ourselves
Rosemary Badcoe
Rosemary Badcoe’s first collection, Drawing a Diagram, is available from Kelsay Books or directly from her. She is editor of the online poetry magazine Antiphon and has been published in a range of magazines.

Urania
Goddess of Space Shots and Surprisingly Distant Robots
Brenda Levy Tate
Brenda celebrates life in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, where she wanders outdoors at midnight, camera and tripod at the ready. She's especially drawn to astrophotography, so Urania is her particular Muse. She was a senior high drama and English teacher for endless years. Now she's a cat lady, poet, occasional singer and cheerful retiree.
Her book: Wingflash
brendatate.com

Polyhymnia
Goddess of Misc.
and Everything
and Holism
and Interdisciplinary Studies
and All That...
Jenn Zed
Biography as above

Credits read by
David Callin
David Callin lives on the Isle of Man.

Additional vocals
Rosemary Badcoe



Sound effects acknowledgements

All sound effects were downloaded from freesound.org under either The Creative Commons Attribution LicenseThe Creative Commons Public domain License, The Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License or The Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.  Changes were made such as fading-in and -out, tempo/frequency shifts, noise reduction etc...

The effects used can be found at:

Calliope:
https://freesound.org/people/Christopherderp/sounds/364531/
https://freesound.org/people/Erdie/sounds/27858/

https://freesound.org/people/brendan89/sounds/321552/
https://freesound.org/people/metrostock99/sounds/345078/
https://freesound.org/people/Snapper4298/sounds/183497/
https://freesound.org/people/Ali_6868/sounds/384911/
https://freesound.org/people/BigDaddyD/sounds/54829/
https://freesound.org/people/Cribbler/sounds/377083/
https://freesound.org/people/YleArkisto/sounds/349654/
https://freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/129745/
https://freesound.org/people/Sevin7/sounds/271039/

Clio:
https://freesound.org/people/jayfrosting/sounds/333402/
https://freesound.org/people/drotzruhn/sounds/405203/
https://freesound.org/people/btherad2000/sounds/328045/
https://freesound.org/people/satanicupsman/sounds/149140/
https://freesound.org/people/Pandos/sounds/362353/
https://freesound.org/people/jayfrosting/sounds/333384/
https://freesound.org/people/unchaz/sounds/150957/
https://freesound.org/people/Benboncan/sounds/82361/
https://freesound.org/people/kukla/sounds/94036/
https://freesound.org/people/loudernoises/sounds/332808/
https://freesound.org/people/Adam_N/sounds/324892/

Euterpe:
https://freesound.org/people/luis_s/sounds/328971/
https://freesound.org/people/pitx/sounds/16188/
https://freesound.org/people/martian/sounds/83155/
https://freesound.org/people/safadancer/sounds/182015/

https://freesound.org/people/karolist/sounds/370934/
https://freesound.org/people/straget/sounds/404687/
https://freesound.org/people/abett/sounds/316703/

Erato:
https://freesound.org/people/11linda/sounds/393600/
https://freesound.org/people/LasciviousGork/sounds/168132/
https://freesound.org/people/acrober/sounds/86112/
https://freesound.org/people/Setuniman/sounds/155256/
https://freesound.org/people/bulbastre/sounds/103991/
https://freesound.org/people/golosiy/sounds/107932/
https://freesound.org/people/safadancer/sounds/182015/
https://freesound.org/people/safadancer/sounds/182018/
https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/195286/
https://freesound.org/people/btherad2000/sounds/328045/

Melpomene:
https://freesound.org/people/pgi/sounds/212606/
https://freesound.org/people/pgi/sounds/212600/
https://freesound.org/people/gkillhour/sounds/267222/
https://freesound.org/people/FillMat/sounds/384401/
https://freesound.org/people/pushkin/sounds/241590/
https://freesound.org/people/visions68/sounds/351333/
https://freesound.org/people/copyc4t/sounds/218372/
https://freesound.org/people/maycuddlepie/sounds/330298/

Terpsichore:
https://freesound.org/people/sevenbsb/sounds/349398/
https://freesound.org/people/FlatHill/sounds/324756/
https://freesound.org/people/stomachache/sounds/274516/
https://freesound.org/people/Vosvoy/sounds/139026/
https://freesound.org/people/botha9johann/sounds/326049/
https://freesound.org/people/SpiceProgram/sounds/365034/
https://freesound.org/people/chinpen/sounds/381959/
https://freesound.org/people/renatalmar/sounds/264981/
https://freesound.org/people/Reitanna/sounds/344001/
https://freesound.org/people/Hybrid_V/sounds/321215/

Thalia:
https://freesound.org/people/toam/sounds/198625/
https://freesound.org/people/esperar/sounds/170781/
https://freesound.org/people/Vosvoy/sounds/139026/
https://freesound.org/people/DJames619/sounds/389247/
https://freesound.org/people/OldSchool_/sounds/408768/
https://freesound.org/people/fisu/sounds/350619/
https://freesound.org/people/pyro13djt/sounds/337997/
https://freesound.org/people/kiddpark/sounds/201159/
https://freesound.org/people/benjaminharveydesign/sounds/366099/
https://freesound.org/people/f_ilippo/sounds/59194/

Urania:
https://freesound.org/people/the_very_Real_Horst/sounds/223419/
https://freesound.org/people/Corsica_S/sounds/52752/
https://freesound.org/people/Oddworld/sounds/125105/
https://freesound.org/people/Wesselorg/sounds/408442/
https://freesound.org/people/digifishmusic/sounds/54190/
https://freesound.org/people/jppi_Stu/sounds/70986/
https://freesound.org/people/primeval_polypod/sounds/158894/

Polyhymnia:
https://freesound.org/people/chipfork/sounds/50087/
https://freesound.org/people/DCPoke/sounds/387978/
https://freesound.org/people/ProjectsU012/sounds/334685/
https://freesound.org/people/felix.blume/sounds/160469/
https://freesound.org/people/MrAuralization/sounds/259292/
https://freesound.org/people/are16ocean/sounds/117597/

Omnes:
https://freesound.org/people/benjaminharveydesign/sounds/315918/
https://freesound.org/people/harrybates01/sounds/254364/
https://freesound.org/people/thegreatperson/sounds/210793/
https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/343130/
https://freesound.org/people/mike_stranks/sounds/341604/
https://freesound.org/people/lebcraftlp/sounds/243627/
https://freesound.org/people/parnellij/sounds/74892/
https://freesound.org/people/Parasonya/sounds/394921/
https://freesound.org/people/ryansnook/sounds/110111/

2017-11-26

The difference between a poetry open mic and the Albert Hall...

A mighty organ,
earlier today...
I go regularly to a poetry open mic now, it's a great evening and the only way to expose WIP poems to the real world in a performance rather than page context.

Standing up in front of people to read poetry terrified me at first, although the knee trembling has slowly declined over the last year.

Which brings us to the topic of confidence.  In one view confidence is precisely that characteristic which enables us to stand in front of an audience and recite your poetry.  It is often said that it is something you either have or do not, and this is very true.

I would just like to add from my own observations, however, that ninety percent of the people who do have confidence shouldn't.

Imposter syndrome: it's what the worthwhile people have.







The difference between a poetry open mic and the Albert Hall...


...lies mainly in the grand piano.
I wish I had a grand piano here
to hide behind.  Serious props!  It must be nice
to let them take the strain of breaking
the audience's hush; to let the instrument speak,
make clear there's something here to hear
a piano could do all that for me but...
can we do better?

How about an organ?

I don't mean some cheesy Hammond
electric thing, or even a theatre organ that rises
unexpectedly through the floor to explode
your expectations,
no...  this was the Albert Hall, remember.

I mean a world-class pipe organ,
rising from the stage, stage upon stage
to fill all available space with keyboards and stops
and pipes and valves and plaster grapes and flourishes
of gilded angel's heads.  An organ which, in fact,
neither Captain Nemo,
nor the Phantom of the Opera
would be embarrassed to play.

If the instrument is grand enough
then like the most committed electronic bands
-- their banks of keyboards, mixing desks and amps --
the audience need not be sure
a performer is in there at all

and I (we're back with the organ now)
could set the manuals on automatic,
climb to a vibrating eyrie, somewhere in the pipework,
and watch the audience
through powerful binoculars
lip read who makes what aside to whom
at special moments in the tune; note
who has to make a toilet run,
which melody they choose
to cover their retreat,
and are they embarrassed.

And in this hypothetical world,
I will always play an encore
but the audience will never know I did.



2017-04-21

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 16th - Language does not exist…

Language does not exist…


Language does not exist…
not in the sense of something we can touch,
engineer, pass from hand to hand, feel the grain.  Language…
the shared delusion is an illusion.  We understand chocolate cake,
a concrete thing: we agree the broad idea
but only one of us recalls Paul, at two years old,
smothered in the stuff.

Less agreement with abstractions: my love
is not your love; and my sovereignty
doesn’t exist at all.

How much worse when we get to something you don’t know.
You mention that you like to go kayaking
but I have never experienced the sudden cool
of near ice water running from a paddle into my sleeve
or the semi-resonance of millimeter-thick fiberglass
rebounding from submerged geography.


Language does not exist…

although the dictionary says otherwise.
The words in the book of lexical lore
will claim to, with precision, pin a meaning on every
possible utterance. They do not and cannot;
Dictionaries do not exist…

Language isn’t definitive or declarative,
it isn’t even functional at heart. It’s metaphorical.

Let’s get high!

We can do that here on the hill,
with the stepladder,
and you are very tall;
and the guitar solo goes up and up;
and you've been promoted, by a higher power;
your salary is now so much,
but this meat’s off;
the electricity is strong;
your church is formal;
and your fashion sense is very sharp today.

All these things are someway “high”
but the only way in which three octaves above middle C
is like a piece of rotten meat,
is buried deep
in our psychology/neurology.


Language does not exist…

not as something fixed
which you can grasp with thought or pen.
Continual flux is all there’s ever been:
spellings, meanings and usages
shift beneath our tongues
like extreme sushimi.

You, I hope, understand me.
Shakespeare, however, would get me less
and Chaucer might think I was speaking
a foreign language.

I take my words back,
I take them back in time until,
somewhere maybe in the 9th or 10th century
there comes a point where they have no meaning at all...


...
because language does not exist.
Not even in the other direction.
My words are of course
recorded for posterity, but after I die and as they age
what anybody understands fades out.
Until there comes a moment
when my great, great, great, great grandchild
factoring, loneish in the interspace
wonders what planet I was from.

If I was truly great,
people would update me
once per generation,
but we can't all be Shakespeare
—if nothing else Shakespeare's already done that.
So there that's us evolving once again.


Language does not exist…

Je suis un éléphant.  I might say,
if
I was French,
and an elephant
. Those who are the sort
to understand French elephants
would shrug
expressively
and wonder why I stated the obvious

but my words would be gibberish
to the differently linguistically endowed.
English exists,
French exists,
and they’re langages…
but they’re not language itself, which does not exist.
English/French dictionaries, in particular, do not exist.


Language is a maelstrom, language is a storm.
People think they pin it down, control it...
define it;
but they may as well bottle the hurricane.

Grammarians will claim they can explain
and lay down every part of speech in grammar books.
Grammar books do not exist
and as for the people who write them:
I've never met one.


Language does not exist…

so set yourself free!
No ploddy, tetrapody emphraslement for me!
No momentary ding.  Talk toboggan listen
all everness towards myself true wordy
and ultimatum infiltrate the thing
of do magnificence, superlative, and evermore unstopped.

Nobody can stop me doing this
and nobody can touch me for it...

because language does not exist.

2016-11-19

Titanium Spork

A bit of an experiment this time.  I wrote this as a performance piece and the words are, frankly, ugly laid out on the page.

Which doesn't matter if I'm going to stand at the front and speak it to you (I call this: Poetry-1.0...)

So I'm going to do that.  I shan't paste the text.  I'll just offer the recording and hope it works for you.  This isn't a change of policy...  I shall continue to post text for the pretty poems.

Please let me know whether this is better, worse, or differently indifferent...










2016-05-02

Releasing a single!

Or rather Hallam London, my musical collaborator, is releasing our song To the Sky, which we dedicate to David Bowie because, as often the case, we didn't realise quite what we had until it was gone.

As usual Hallam wrote the music and I provided the lyrics.  He also got other friends and professionals to contribute, see the bandcamp page for full credits...

This is the song I wrote about last week, explaining its creation story (no radioactive animals were involved, somebody may have fallen to Earth) and also see here for the lyrics.

Anyway, please enjoy the song and if you feel inspired to contribute a small sum to this enterprise, please buy it (for as little as 1€; for American friends 1€ is roughly $1.15 at today's prices...)

Please also share this song promiscuously.  You remember how Andy Warhol promised everybody 15 minutes of fame in the future?  Well it's been the future for over 15 years now and my fame still hasn't arrived...









2016-04-26

To the Sky...

You haven't heard much from me about my on-going collaboration with German Rock Musician Hallam London.  Partly this has been because we had a bit of a slow period (as documented here) and partly it has been because I've been busy changing my job, delivering the kid to/from University, saving the World from killer rhubarb (don't ask) etc etc.

Also another reason is I've been busy with the songs themselves.  Hallam and I just had an amazing six week burst of creativity during which we finished five songs.  (For a given value of finished, music production goes through many, many stages such as arrangement, performance, production, mixing etc etc...)

However, it is not of these songs that I wish to speak.

In January this year, David Bowie died.  Hallam and I were just starting a new song when we heard the news.  We had some cause for introspection.  We'd never discussed Bowie, but as you can imagine he was a formative influence for us both.  We thought about doing some sort of song as a tribute, and then we had to wrestle with the question of how hubristic that was.  After some soul searching, we realised that all of our music comes from a very Bowie place anyway: it's all about gender and sanity and slices of everyday or unusual lives; we're also frequently a bit SciFi; often trying to push some envelope or other; and as every song is very different, I think we're reinventing ourselves even faster than he did!

So anyway, we got on with the song.  Unusually we reversed of our usual way of working.  Hallam recorded the musical idea first, and I analysed the metrical structure of his "na naaa nah" place-holder lyrics.  Then I wrote a prototype chorus.

So far so good, but we had to decide what the song was about, and we kept cycling back to Bowie-like (Bowiesque?  Bowiesian?) ideas.  In the end we were drawn strongly to the ideas in Major Tom and Space Oddity—and who doesn't want a space launch in the middle their song?and a love story, obviously...

And now it's finished.  It's partly a Bowie tribute, but obviously also has to stand as a song on its own.  Hallam has gone beyond the mere "teaser" quality of our previous releases with this one.  He's hired a great drummer, and an engineer to do the mixing and production.  He's currently finalising the artwork.

It's called To the Sky, and next week Hallam will release it as a single!

Yes, you do have to wait until then...  but in the meantime here's the play-list with our previous two teasers Anger Bob and Identity...







And BONUS! a recording of The rain in certain car parks (yes I did call a song that).  This live recording isn't polished as Hallam's studio recordings, but it does have a live band and audience...

 

2015-01-24

First public sighting -- early signs of success!

Hallam came second in the preliminary round of Emergenza that he was in last night, so they go through to the semi-finals!

I'd better start writing some more songs.  Maybe something about sexual chemistry... what rhymes with amphoteric zwitterion?

First public sighting...

Hallam London performed three of our new songs for the first time in public just now here.  I watched the whole thing via live streaming, very exciting to hear the songs performed with a band and live audience!

You can see a recording of the performance here although our new songs do not begin until around 9:25.

These songs are:
  • Bright Girl
  • DanceCrime
  • The Rain in Certain Car Parks
 I may say more about them in future posts.  For the moment it has just been a exciting evening, even if it is slightly strange to be watching from a sofa several hundred miles away...