Poetry Out Loud was a series of ten LPs released between 1969 and 1977 as a sort of “magazine of oral poetry.” The driving forces behind Poetry Out Loud were two couples: Peter and Patricia B McGarry (Harleman), from Topeka, Kansas, and Klyd and Linda Watkins, from Nashville; together they followed their muse of “taking poetry off the page,” seeking a centuries-long end-around back to the oral tradition. As Peter said it then, “The poem on the page has no relationship to the poet. There has to be an integral relationship between poet, performer and audience.” In other words, this is word-as-sound art, a heavy trip. ISSUE Project Room presents a rare live performance with Klyd and Linda Watkins, and Peter Harleman, along with special guest Tom Carter, Keith Connolly, Dave Nuss and Messages.
While the ensuing years have pushed Poetry Out Loud toward the fringes of crate-digging awareness, they won over some significant fans in their day. Robert Palmer (author of Deep Blues, among other works) wrote about Poetry Out Loud at length in Rolling Stone more than once during the ’70s. “Such sounds, with their welter of enharmonic pitches, stimulate most of the surface of the basilar membrane, thus ensuring the transmission of as many simultaneous neural impulses as possible to as much of the brain as possible,” he wrote in the notes for Poetry Out Loud Number Nine, getting at the physio-mystical heart of things. “And the neurons are able to rest between firings because of the rapid decay time of the sounds, thus insuring continuing peak effects for the sound and allowing changed or other sung material to periodically resume its own hypnotic pattern. In other words, the shaman’s basic equipment – voice, drum, rattle – is actually a sophisticated tool for self-induced hypnosis, or trance.” That (and much more) said, no written words are going to prepare you for the experience of hearing what might be one of our most visionary release – Mike Wolf
Messages, a duo of Taketo Shimada and Tres Warren, have been playing together since 2006, exploring contemporary variations on the Drone formula pioneered by La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, Yoshi Wada and other Fluxus tone-worshippers. Shimada himself has some connections to Manhattan’s avant forefathers, working with figures such as Henry Flynt and Alison Knowles. Existing primarily as a live act over the years, Shimada and Warren (who is also a member of Psychic Ills) and Spencer Herbst (of Mountains of Mattalama) have jammed in lofts and at art shows around NYC, sculpting debilitating sound pieces from guitar, electronics and classical Indian instruments.
Tom Carter augments rudimentary guitar skills with unreliable instruments, cranky analog electronics, and disintegrating practice amps. He has managed to forge his evolving ideas of complete tonal immersion (and the quest for the perfect fuzz tone) into a layered sonic toolkit of rough beauty and unrefined proficiency.
Keith Connolly dropped out of Suny Buffalo in 1992, abandoning studies in english literature to form No Neck Blues Band with Jason Meagher and Pat Murano. For the past 20 years NNCK has explored simultaneity through improvised performance and encrypted documentation. Initially inspired by the louisville cum NYC art rock of the now defunct Circle X as well as concurrent murmurings of underground groups like Royal Trux and Harry Pussy, NNCK came to embrace, among other things, Jean Crotti and Susanne Ducamp’s Tabu, Japanese Ghost Mythology, LSD, Psychedelic Consciousness, Lovecraftian phantasmagoria and Kasmir Malevitch’s supermatism. Under Connolly’s art direction the group has published 30 LPs, CDs and singels, Performed extensively throughout the US, Canada and Europe. Dave Nuss is also a member of NNCK
