Continuing our cross species experimentation (with Elo Masing in Berlin), we present today a new composition by Simon Tyszko specifically made for, and with the help of, other kinds of people.
We start with the sublime
Leo Ferré
song “L’étoile A Pleuré Rose,” from his groundbreaking album Verlaine et Rimbaud. Released in 1964, this album is a profound musical homage to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. The magnificent Ferré, a revered French singer, composer, and poet, skillfully sets the evocative and often tumultuous verses of these two iconic poets to music, blending his own lush, melancholic, and passionate style with their rich, symbolic imagery. The album is celebrated for its deep emotional resonance and Ferré’s ability to capture the essence of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s work, making their 19th-century poetry so truly accessible and relevant to contemporary audiences.
L’Étoile a pleuré rose
L’étoile a pleuré rose au coeur de tes oreilles,
L’infini roulé blanc de ta nuque à tes reins
La mer a perlé rousse à tes mammes vermeilles
Et l’Homme saigné noir à ton flanc souverain.
Pink wept the star
Pink wept the star at the heart of your ears,
White rolled the infinity from your nape to your loins
Red pearled the sea at your vermillion bosom
Black bled the man at your sovereign side
Using a digital delay, I then capture and freeze the powerful final extended vocal note from Ferré’s wife and frequent collaborator, Marie Christine Ferré, and go on to build an improvised, “performed” composition extending to the final moments of the program, entirely using a range of swirling digital effects.
This technique grew from my early live sound engineering work, where my enthusiasm for ‘playing’ sounds would perhaps sometimes cross an unspoken boundary between the musicians and the live ‘producer.’ Most directly, this was evident when touring with Alan Vega
in the early eighties on a European tour without his other half of Suicide, Martin Rev, using instead some session musicians and an ancient drum machine which replaced the expected live drummer at the last minute as they left New York.
During one of Vega’s wild and often violent performances, marked by him creating percussive sounds hitting himself with his vocal mic, I had started trying to grab and extend these improvised beats using an analogue Roland Space echo, mixing them along with his expressive yelps and screams, which I threw way above the visceral low end of the solid relentless electronic kick and snares of the drum machine……. until one night somewhere in Sweden (I think?), as Vega left the stage he flipped the controls on the drum machine to a full manic speed, which I then captured using a digital delay, and started feeding the sound back and forth between various effects, sweeping the sound dub style from left to right long after the band and Vega had left the stage.
I was so engaged in the process that I had not really noticed they had gone until I glanced up and saw Vega watching the audience (and me) from the wings and grooving on the sound I was creating. The audience continued dancing until I eventually faded the sound out, at which point the house exploded into applause and calls for encore.
Years later, I again saw Vega live in London, and was pleased to see this had become a formal, if perhaps sanitised part of his live set, and this week with Sign Waves for Cats and Dogs (and other people too), we explore that idea a little further……… which I hope you enjoy listening to just as much as I did making it.
