Warm Not Cold

How do you record an album anyway? Can you record a spoken word album without a microphone? If so, would it be music? You can sequence sound clips and make them go “boom, bip, boom-bip.” You can take the mic and go, “the boom, the bip, the boom-bip” (Push It Along). So the door between poetry and a drum track is definitely open. Beat poets and beat-boxers have been crossing that threshhold for awhile. Kurt Schwitters may have left that door unlocked. Hmmm… But in the cut and paste era what’s a performance anyway? I saw Camille Paloque-Berges read her myspace comments the other night and that was pretty good. Performative typing taken into performance poetry vocal-space. Justin Katko combs active duty military message boards and recombines the vernacular through multiple voices funnelled through his own performing throat. OK. Let’s throw it backwards: Funnel our poetry back through some unwieldly and half-baked consumer software machine logic. Here are two more installments in my attempt to confuse syllables with beats, machine-voice with spoken word, text with score. Come to think of it, it would be nice to be out under the T R E E S right about now. Warm Not Cold!!!