Collapsing Rock, Pop & Noise

12	Text & Voice 2	Listening examples include: John Giorno, Judd Fine, Daniel Steven Crafts, Charles Armikanian, William Burroughs, Julia Heyward, Janet Jackson, Roxanne Shante
	The Role of Words	Concrete poetry, performance, text pieces, word play, interactivity, voice instrument, rap & acapealla mixes

CONCRETE POETRY & POEM PERFORMANCE

Recordings here deal with either:
1. the documentation of a particular real-time performance; or
2. a version or 'realization' of a particular poem as recorded in the tape medium.

The text and its performance are the aspects being centred on, with the performance being the main expressive means of executing or delivering the text.

John Giorno - SHIT PISS BLOOD PUS & BRAINS (excerpt -1976)
Note how Giorno 'performs with himself' by multi-tracking his own voice reading the same text out-of-synch. The effect is one of escalating hysteria as the listener is presented with a multiple of voices that are each saying the same thing.

Jackson Marlow - GURU GURU GATE (1976)
This poem performance harks back to the Dadaist tradition of 'sound poems' where particular words are explored for their sonic/aural/oral/acoustic effects and impressions which in turn colour the performance and interpretation of the words' literal/semantic/symbolic/poetic meanings.
 
TEXT PIECES & WORD PLAYS

In this category of works, the text - as a body of communicable meanings - is of primary focus, in that the sonic explorations and their abstract qualities are not as foregrounded as they are in the Concrete Poetry examples.

Charles Armirkanian - MUSHROOMS (FOR JOHN CAGE) (1974)
Jud Fine - POLYNESIAN/POLYHEDRON (1982)
Note the effect of how the meanings of these words - their familiarity in concept and sound - is slowly played with until they start to fall apart or become 'more abstracted'.
 
INTERACTIVE PROCESSES

Deals with ways in which a recording of a text piece or poem performance can then be further manipulated or extended by an interaction between it and another process.

Vincenzo Agnetti - PIECES OF SOUND (198?)
Collage based on the relationships between time as experienced during linguistic comprehension (a voice counting out 1,2,3,4,etc.) and the musical or temporal rhythm produced by cutting real/musical sounds up. This collage is then a collage of temporalities or modes of temporal experience.

Piotri Kowalski & William Burroughs - YOU ONLY CALL THE OLD DOCTOR ONCE (1982)
Kowalski electronically processes a recording of a Burroughs' recital so that on the left speaker you have Burroughs' literal cut-up and on the other speaker Kowalski's sonic cut-up. Note the abstracted sonic texture of Burroughs' voice here.

Daniel Steven Crafts - SOAP OPERA SUITE : Part I - The Essence Of Melodrama & SNAKE OIL SYMPHONY : Part III (both 1982)
The soap opera piece simply collages untreated recordings of day time soaps as recorded from TV, so that there appears to be a linkage (emotional, plot, character, etc.) between all the fragments. The irony, though, is that this collage approach replicates the way in which soap operas work : by serialization, where anything can lead to anything else irrespective of logics or narrative codes. Soap operas actually don't have endings - they just keep going. This piece works in exactly the same way, playing with our inherent tendency to make sense of things by making connections between them. The Snake Oil piece deals with similar materials (ranting ads from TV) but this time plays more on the textures of the voices and what emotional/symbolic/semiotic effect they contribute to our experience of such vocal 'hard sells'.
 
VOICE AS INSTRUMENT

Julia Heyward - MONGOLIAN FACE SLAP, BIG COUP (Parts 1 & 2) & NOSE FLUTE (all 1977)
Explorations of the voice's potential to realize sounds it normally doesn't achieve within our culture. Here the influences are vocal and nasal techniques from Mongolia and Bulgaria.

Laurie Anderson - TIME TO GO (FOR DIEGO) (1977)
A fairly 'musical' piece where the original inspiration has been her experience of a guard at a museum clicking his fingers and telling everyone it's time to go at 5pm. Note how the instruments are used to recreate a sonic experience that originally was produced by a human voice in a particular social setting.

Love Of Life Orchestra - DON'T DON'T (excerpt - 1979)
A tongue in cheek piece that plays upon the glossy effect of rich vocal harmonies in MOR music.

David Byrne - IN THE FUTURE (from THE KNEE PLAYS Opera) (1985)
Note the juxtaposition between Byrne's nasal voice and its simplistic enunciation and the music's slow and banal rhythms/harmonies. This is further juxtaposed against the higher aspirations connoted by addressing 'the future'.
 
RAP

This 'talking-as-singing' has its roots in a number of musical styles and forms:
1. Jamaican toasting of the 60s - where a DJ would toast or talk in hypnotic rhyme style over instrumental dub reggae or ska patterns; and
2. Jazz scat singing from the 40s/50s - nonsense rhyming, word plays and sonic utterances which were primarily used as vocal syncopation to the music's rhythms.

Rap starts around the mid 70s and peaks around 1983 (the 'golden year' of rap). From about 1985 onwards, rap has become a prime base upon which more specifically defined hip hop sub-genres have developed (B-Boy, Fly Girl, Gangster, Hardcore, Techno, Hip House, New Jack Swing, etc). Some examples:

Sugar Hill Gang - RAPPERS DELIGHT (1979)
George Clinton - LOOPZILLA (1982)
Grandmaster Melle - WHITE LINES (1983)
Roxanne Shante - THE REAL ROXANNE (1985)
Janet Jackson - WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY? (Accapella version -1986)
Kraftwerk - MUSIQUE NON STOP (1987)
Run DMC - UPTEMPO (1987)
Bipo - WHY (1989)
Monie Love - I CAN DO THIS (1989).