Monday, 22 January 2007
ian txthead
My latest Txthead is of Ian McMillan, the poet. I’ve taken lots of quotes about him, from his website, and run it all together.
Then I’ve coloured the six discrete letters of his name, and left the rest of the text grey. And cut the result into a profile that looks (a bit) like Ian.
On a whim, I’ve tried singing the resulting text - assigning notes to the coloured letters, and singing the whole text leaving gaps for the letters. The latter I did in C, the coloured letters are in D, E, F, G,
Monday, 22 January 2007
mike sings the i ching
I once tried to create a poem inspired by the idea of “moving lines” in I Ching hexagrams.
The thumbnail image above shows how there are 64 possible hexagrams; each is made of six lines, and each line can be broken or unbroken. Hence, 64 permutations.
What is less well known (well, was to me) is that there are, actually at least double that number of permutations. You don’t often cast a static hexagram but one with at least one “moving line” ie a line that’s broken but about to become
Thursday, 18 January 2007
txthead bb
To accompany my new Txthead - see today’s blog - I’ve made a sound file reading the Txthead.
The letter clusters tend to re-occur. I’ve tried sped up and slowed down parallel voices.
It’s interesting when whole words happen to come up - because all the letters in the word also occur in the name of the subject of the “profile”.
Saturday, 6 January 2007
singing through the beatles
This long Come Flying song, which I’ve lost the title of, was written using words from the lyrics of a different Beatles album for each verse.
So verse 1’s words all come from the first album, verse 2’s from the second or third, right up to the last verse twisting bits of Across the Universe, from the swansong Let it Be album.
The “ah ha ha” section in Verse 4 is, for example, an allusion to Blue Jay Way.
I don’t believe this violates any copyright laws - I am using words from the
Friday, 5 January 2007
full fathom five
This is a song from 1999.
I’d broken up from Come Flying (see previous) and was composing with pop chords (rather than someone else’s or ones I’d made up on the fretboard). Especially I was working on piano.
I love this song, a setting of the Shakespeare poem from The Tempest.
I worked on it the way I would work on a translation, half critic of the poem, half looking for ways to express myself and bend the rules. I was trying to get all the words to matter, to have a place on the bend of
I have an essay online (see Links) about Performing (eg the Visual) Poem. Here are some examples of how I tackle my own visual poems as sound.
I have found that my double column poems (for example, from Trancelated - see Links) gather more interest accompanied by a performance.
It’s my intention to perform them all, preferably as duets, and publish them, as audio CD and book.
