ageing

Now there's a title I never thought I'd use. One of the major presences of my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood was the fear of death, and a related fear of ageing because it brought death nearer. Several times a year, and even now though less frequently, a wave of fear would strike. At best I'd have to stop until the feeling subsided. At worst I'd end up crawling around on the floor whimpering. But something has changed over the last three years. I've grown more relaxed, more confident, and happier. Since my last birthday I've even begun to look forward to being forty - because 39 is a nothing sort of an age, and it's nice to get meaningless milestones out of the way. This is all preamble though. The real subject is where my sound poetry seems to be going at present. How the two connect will become clear.

A disclaimer first, as my sound poetry's an ongoing process it will almost certainly go off in directions not predicted here. The outlines of how I got here may be familiar to some regular readers but it's worth running through them again. I started trying to make visual poetry at the beginning of 2008 but wasn't happy with the results. However, I had a decent quality microphone and a Loop Station effects pedal and thought it might be worth trying some sound poetry. The initial pieces sound appalling now, but they sounded good enough at the time to encourage further experiments. By the beginning of this year I felt confident enough to try and release a CD-R of sound poetry each month for the whole of 2009.

This intensity of workload has seen an evolution in the techniques and approaches used, and in the sounds achieved. It has also seen the work start to shift away from things immediately recognisable as sound poetry and into areas closer to sound art and more recently performance art. The first documented step is probably May's CD-R South. The idea was to use cassette recorders to bring in field recordings from around the city to add texture to the pieces. That didn't work terribly well as the recording's weren't great quality, and after April's harsh and noisy at this time of year it's always unpredictable it seemed like a good time to go for a totally different sound. That ended up coming mainly from quiet vocal sounds and a few props like a plastic bag, paper and so on. Much the same techniques were used for June's Whisper. The voice had become peripheral, and in places absent. Where it was present it was mostly breath. The reasons for this are partly that there were a number of sound art events locally, and partly that it's interesting to push in contrary directions every so often.

Already, inspired by Lucio Capece's performance at Islington Mill where he used simple but challenging techniques to achieve live sounds that he could easily have looped live once and then not had to worry about, I was thinking about the body in sound poetry. Another influence was simply performing and having people comment on the physical aspect of it. The sessions for the most recent CD-R, July's tragic body, began to push in that direction too. The first two sessions were hopeless, although for a while the second set seemed to be if not usable then at least the basis for another recording. In the event a throwaway piece fooling around with feedback that could be developed into an installation was the first of two inspirations that led to the pieces eventually recorded. The second inspiration was the entirety of the Marina Abramović curated event at The Whitworth Gallery. The use of the body as an expressive tool made a lot of sense. So in the third sessions for tragic body, which are those on the CD, breath is used until it runs out, the sound of saliva in the mouth becomes as much a part of the texture of a piece as the actual vocalisation, the body blocks the microphone, occasionally moving it so feedback is generated, and a microphone is rubbed over my body and the sounds layered using the loop pedal.

But this was only really a transitional stage to a new set of ideas, hinted at in the title tragic body. This was the idea that it might be interesting and perhaps revealing to document physical change and eventually decline. This is an idea that would have been unthinkable less than six months ago, and which would have made me feel sick a year ago. What I am now beginning to move towards is a more performance oriented sound poetry practice where I will push my body hard. At present it mainly involves physical exertion for relatively short periods and within fairly comfortable limits. But clearly to be of value it should involve more discomfort, whether that involves doing things I find frightening or physically extremely challenging, or simple endurance. There seems to be a lot of potential for development here, and I'm fascinated by the idea of confronting my own mortality, which has been such a persistent terror, head-on.