A Forest Petrifies – Diamond Feedback

The fourth issue of the annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales, around the topic of voice.

The voice is everywhere, infiltrating everything, making civilisation, marking out territories with infinite borders, spreading from the farthest reaches to the most intimate spaces. It can be neither reduced nor summarised. And accordingly, when taken as a theme, the voice is inexhaustible, even when seen in the light of its very particular relation with the sonic or the musical, as is the case in most of the texts collected in this volume. There is no point therefore in trying to circumscribe or amalgamate the multiple avatars of the voice. We must rather try to apprehend what the voice can do, to envisage its landscape, its potential effects.
 
Spectres is an annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

Edited by François J. Bonnet and Bartolomé Sanson.

Contributions by Joan La Barbara, Sarah Hennies, Peter Szendy, Youmna Saba, Lee Gamble, Ghédalia Tazartès, David Grubbs, Stine Janvin, Pierre Schaeffer, Akira Sakata, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, Yannick Guédon, François J. Bonnet, John Giorno.

Chris Mann is an Australian-American composer, poet and performer specializing in compositional linguistics. Mann studied Chinese and linguistics at the University of Melbourne, and his interest in language, systems, and philosophy is evident in his work. Mann founded the New Music Centre in 1972 and taught at the State College of Victoria in the mid-1970s. Mann moved to New York in the 1980s and was an associate of American composers John Cage and Kenneth Gaburo. Mann has recorded with the ensemble Machine For Making Sense with Amanda Stewart and others, Chris Mann and the Impediments, and Chris Mann and The Use. Mann currently teaches in the Media Studies Graduate program at The New School.

In the powerful follow up to her critically acclaimed debut collection, poet and activist Fariha Róisín is writing, praying, clawing, and scratching her way out of the grips of generational trauma on the search for the freedom her mother never received and the kindness she couldn’t give.

This collection of poetry asks a kaleidoscope of Who is my family? My father? How do I love a mother no longer here? Can I see myself? What does it mean to be Bangladeshi? What is a border? Innately hopeful and resolutely strong, Fariha's voice turns to the optimism and beauty inherent in rebuilding the self, and in turn, the world that the self moves through. Ubiquitous to the human experience, Survival Takes a Wild Imagination is an illuminating breath of fresh air from a powerful poetic voice.

Proposed by Chris Evans, Sudden Wealth is a collaboration with Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Graham Kelly and invited poets and artists who use spoken word as their medium. 

Sudden Wealth looks to how the flux of subjectivity in language can be shaped, agitated and re-imagined through a triangulation between written composition, intonation, and extrinsic sound composition. The latter spans analogue and digital instrumentation, foley recordings and algorithmically derived musical patterns. Divergent methods of composition work on and into a voice, modelling intonation, and affecting its sense and intent. 

This first iteration has been made with Roy Claire Potter, an artist who tells stories from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings. A rapid vocal delivery, a sense of restricted or partial views of space, complex social and group dynamics and the aftermath of violent events are recurrent strands of Potter’s writing, which are often delivered with a dark and sometimes wilful humour. 

Chris Evans was the bassist with the now defunct Life Without Buildings and has previously produced musical compositions with Morten Norbye Halvorsen together with farmers and accountants for his ongoing series ‘Jingle’. Graham Kelly joins Evans and Halvorsen for this present series, Sudden Wealth.

Vocals: Roy Claire Potter.
Electronics: Morten Norbye Halvorsen.
Bass: Chris Evans.
Guitar: Graham Kelly.
Arranged and mixed by Morten Norbye Halvorsen.

Through a voice at once intimate and collective, Lucas Juárez expands the powerful presence of Tutunakú roots to open up territories and to interweave desirous bodies, dream relationships, and the memories of women ancestors. This beautiful translation by Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos, in a precious handmade edition, affirms the trilingual (Tutunakú, Spanish and English) as an ethical strategy of listening to and translating the world. Red Seed collects twelve poems of women's sexualities and spirits in which body, language and territory are political spaces that Indigenous memory expands within and renews.

—Maricela Guerrero, author of The Dream of Every Cell

Drawing on the history of “romance” as the troubadours knew it and the titular flower’s ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: “I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.” In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.

The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humor. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the “secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love,” and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.

Algeria, Capital: Algiers by Anna Gréki is co-published by Pinsapo Press and CUNY Lost & Found, translated by Marine Cornuet, and introduced by Ammiel Alcalay.

Anna Gréki (1931-1966) was an Algerian poet of French descent. A member of the Algerian Communist Party, she was arrested and imprisoned for her participation in the Algerian liberation struggle in Algiers, in 1957. Algérie, capitale Alger, a collection of poems written during Gréki's imprisonment, was published in 1963 in a French and Arabic bilingual edition. Algeria, Capital: Algiers makes this work available to English readers for the first time.

"Anna Gréki was a particularly inconvenient pied noir—not loyal enough for the French colonists and too compromised for the Algerian nationalists—and so she was shunted to the margins of Algerian literary history. Nevertheless, it’s time she takes her place at the center of that narrative, and these accomplished translations constitute a necessary English-language introduction to this secret garden of Maghrebi poetry. Gréki’s poetry is electrified by the heady heights of the war of liberation, but arguably it finds its truest expression in her paeans to the wild hills and impregnable peaks of the Aurès mountains, where she was born and where she found a sense of peace which otherwise eluded her in her brief life." —André Naffis-Sahely

“Nothing happens here but everything burns.” From the prison where she was tortured by French authorities in 1950s Algeria, Anna Greki stays in touch, feverishly, with “this world of vulnerable flesh.” Addressed to her friends and comrades in struggle, to the land and the leaves and the birds, these poems defy “the war, this male ax,” invoking the future with “a trust so total / I can almost touch it.” Marine Cornuet’s translation deftly conveys Greki’s intimate language of the senses, to “transcribe with words what is done without them.” —Omar Berrada

"How fitting that a bilingual edition of Anna Gréki’s poems should be published now: a French poet born in Algeria, anti-colonialist (imprisoned for that) as Algeria battled for independence, writing in French, like Kateb Yacine, to show her freedom from French hegemony, but also her freedom as a woman writer to forge a transcendent and engaged poetics." —Marilyn Hacker