Talking with Style.
I am interested in media forms in which the spoken word, soundscapes, and music intersect. So this three part article will explore examples where the voice is employed in the musical mix more as narrator or commentator than a singer.
Consider this piece ‘In Smiling in Slow Motion‘. I heard it first on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Unclassified’ programme (8 December 2022, in the episode titled ‘Mesmeric’). It is a work by the sound artist and composer Alexander Tucker, who was a friend of the late Keith Collins, the partner of the film maker Derek Jarman (the latter died in 1994). Jarman and Collins lived in Prospect Cottage at Dungeness, the headland on the coast of Kent, which has one of the largest expanses of shingle beach in Europe and is a UK national nature reserve. ‘In Smiling in Slow Motion‘ was recorded at Prospect Cottage after Collins’ death in 2018 and is a tribute to Jarman who died in 1994. It features the actual spoken words and field recordings of Collins and builds these into a rather a surreal soundscape where the deceased Collins effectively collaborates with Tucker in his production from within the actual environment Collins and Jarman lived. Tucker used minimal instrumentation (basically a cello) but a lot of integration and processing. But is it poetry? Is it music? Is it something else? To me, the result is greater than the sum of the parts and the repurposing of Collins’ recorded reflections is a great example of how art can arise from unlikely sources. That’s not to say that it instantly pressed my emotional buttons or that I even liked the end result. I admire its creativity nevertheless, and it is certainly evocative.
One of my own experiments into spoken words and music was considered in an earlier posting ‘In Their Minds‘ (Dada de Dada, July 2022). An audio extract from this is included below. An enhanced version of the verse has also been recently integrated into a completely different musical background which makes for an interesting contrast of the two. This will be considered in a forthcoming posting.
In part two I consider dub poetry and hip hop.
