Susan Howe and David Grubbs, “Souls of the Labadie Tract,” live in London, September 2009
You’ll need 43 minutes and a quiet mind to take in the entirety of this superb work. Poet Susan Howe and experimental musician David Grubbs previously collaborated on a work evoking the landscape that surrounds Lake George in upstate New York. “Souls of the Labadie Tract” features Howe reading and Grubbs playing khaen baet and khaen jet (harmonic, multi-piped mouth organs originating in Southeast Asia). His live mixing of the performance provides another “instrument.”
Andrew Zawacki characterizes Souls of the Labadie Tract as “an excavation of site and citation, of quasi-utopian polis and poetry ‘half-smothered in local history.’” “Fascinated by ‘lexical inscape,’ while allured by ‘allophone tangle,’ too, Howe forges the spoken to script. ‘Font-voices,’ she ventures, ‘summon a reader into visible earshot’” (Boston Review). Reviewing the original Blue Chopsticks release, Joel Calahan observes, “[Howe and Grubbs’] project both foregrounds the inhumanness of the voice broken down into digital impulses, while recovering the vitality of the human as prophet in a recorded medium. Essentially, the duo produce a work that reminds us how all communication proves to be effectively mechanical.”
See Penn Sound’s page for more information and for the recordings of their previous collaboration, Thiefth.
Find both works at Drag City.
