EVP Stockton

mad maxville, the place the students used to call mount doom in durham. actually an enjoyable day, a train over Yorkshire from Manchester to start, to Thornaby. Then it was explained to me what MadeinChelsea was, sonic interruption, a t=rex swipe into buildings, half the shops shut, like depression shut, tattoos on the back of a man's head in caffe nero. The Arc is a beautiful theatre, like a roman outpost for art. Wandering Stockton for hours and hours. I'd been before but why? I did many circles. Lots of charity shops. Bought a blue crocodile, a pig and a whoopie cushion. Listening to arvo part, a mistake, too many ideas for novels. The show itself was good, nerveless again, swishing, seemed to be easier now. Even the closer wasn't too hurtful and draining, but enough. A couple talked in the front row, I cane pointed them, adlibbed the most since Brighton. Premier fucking inn again, but a privilege even that. Second to last. Such fast passing, sad, learned too much.

EVP Manchester

Maybe the most involving performance, maybe. The Burgess foundation was an intense environment, inspiring for me http://www.anthonyburgess.org/ His spirit was about, I waited between sets in his library, filled with first editions, signed copies, weird books that must've been his. I sprinkled his ashes on stage. 1985. I felt quite warmed by the presence of friends in the audience, Holly Pester (who I beared, hoovered, retched and flicked), Tom Jenks, Scott Thurston - poets I respect, fun to show the stuff before them, and it was packed, and dark, and I felt stranglely nerveless beforehand, and so it did flow, lots of heavy pukkke. Exhaustion can relax, can afford funny rifts in a character. I returned the morning after, to buy some books, and I had a open, meditative afternoon waiting before, in central Manchester, confused and enlightened by its bleak newness and unfinishedness, like my performance and my piece. I worried I was a little too ebullient after, too loud and sharp in conversing etc...but our hotel was bizzarre, like the overlook, shining-esque, and that returned me to ground. 

poetry in Recours au Poeme in French translation

http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/ Thanks to the efforts of the excellent translator Elizabeth Brunazzi and the tireless and extraordinary editorial efforts of Matthieu Baumier my work has appeared in the respected French journal Recours au Poeme in both English and French translation. The work is taken from my meditations on scent sequence. http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/po%C3%A8tes/sj-fowler

 http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/flub-ambergris
http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/were-it-not-i-then-were-it-not
http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/fog
http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/i%E2%80%99m-smart-enough-make-my
http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/cleansing-compliment

 Recours au poeme has an almost unmatched width, frequency and quality, and Matthieu's work is truly both inclusive and ambitious. 

Recours au Poème
Poésies & Mondes poétiques
 Nouveaux articles en ligne cette semaine
Sommaire 51 / Issue 51 /Sumario 51
Pour toute proposition ou demande : 
Focus     Nikola Živanović, 6  poèmes
PoèmesJoël Bécam Anne-Cécile Causse Margaret Beston Roger des Roches SJ Fowler
 Chroniques 
Vu du Sud (3), la poésie d’ Abdellatif Laâbi, par Nasser Edine Boucheqif
Lecture (s), autour d’Eva-Maria Berg, Jigmé Thrinlé Gyatso, Danièle Faugeras, Dinu Flamand, par Paul Vermeulen
 Essai
Tête d’Or, la force et le sens (Paul Claudel), par Claude-Pierre Pérez
Ecrire en situation mauricienne : l’obscurcissement de la perspective ontologique, par Catherine Boudet
CritiquesLa doublure de R. Roussel, par Lucien Wasselin
Brocéliande, de Gilles Baudry et Pierre Denic, par Pierre Tanguy
Anthologie de poésie canarienne : ontologie visible pour archipel inventé, par C. Boudet
Toucher terre de Vincent Pélissier, par Matthieu Baumier
Sur deux récents ouvrages de Salah Stétié, par JP Gavart Perret
  RencontreRencontre entre Sege Nunez Tolin, Marc Dugardin et Jean-François Grégoire
 Directeur de la publication  :
Gwen Garnier-Duguy
Rédacteur en chef :
Matthieu Baumier

Fight music: an evening celebrating the work of Philip Venables

I'm really delighted to say on June 30th at the amazing LSO St Luke's on Old Street in London, at 7.30pm, there will be a portrait concert of the recent work of Philip Venables, who I worked with for the London Sinfonietta Blue Touch Paper project on our piece the Revenge of Miguel Cotto.  The concert will be one hour and is free to attend.

The concert features five recent pieces, all focusing on muscular music, spoken text and themes of violence, socialist protest and memory.  Performers will include the Ligeti Quartet, Ashot Sarkissjan, The Warehouse Ensemble, Melinda Maxwell, Leigh Melrose, Richard Baker and The London Sprechchor.  The concert is being supported by LSO Soundhub, the Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust and Arts Council England. 

It will include a performance of the Revenge of Miguel Cotto, so my sound poetry and words will grace a really incredible stage once again, something I am very proud of. 

Pictures from EVP in Liverpool

Pictures from EVP in Liverpool. The same site also published a review of the show, which was rightly glowing about Hannah Silva and Honor Favin, and included this snippet "The evening was compered by London-based poet SJ Fowler (main image), who through a series of vignettes attempted to channel a retching spiritualist's progressive decline into suicidal despair. While amusing, and Fowler has obvious talent and performance skills, it was impossible to banish images of Derek Acorah from my mind (albeit during his little documented laudanum phase), and although thematically relevant, we found it hard to understand how the piece contributed to the promised exploration." An amazing link, Acorah is the kind of underground avantgarde television personality whose authenticity I often have felt I am aping on this tour.
http://www.peterguy.merseyblogs.co.uk/2013/05/electronic-voice-phenomena-fea.html

EVP review on a younger theatre

http://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-electric-voice-phenomena/      Have you ever been to a séance? Have you ever been tempted to try to contact the other side? Have you ever felt the presence of some ethereal being? Or have you always been the sensible, cynical type that thinks all of that is rot? Well, either way, the boundary-pushing, ground-breaking and dimension-rattling cabaret that is Electronic Voice Phenomena will certainly make you question the beliefs you hold most dear. Electronic Voice Phenomena combines experimental technology, literature, music and performance in a show that focuses, quite bluntly, on death and the afterlife. The project is inspired by the notorious ‘Breakthrough’ experiments conducted by Konstantin Raudive in the 1970s, where he captured voices-from-beyond in electronic noise.
This show is unique. It is not easy, not always clear and certainly not easily comprehensible. But it is fascinating. The wordsmith SJ Fowler acts almost like a compere, being the through line, almost a reference point that keeps the audience anchored into the proceedings. This is very useful, and makes the show nicely coherent. He tells us that he is a conduit the spirits use to contact the living, flipping the perception that it is only the living that tries to contact the dead. He also introduces the idea of a kind of electronic empathy that the living can find with the dead. These are complex concepts that are gradually elaborated on........
........The show always comes back to SJ Fowler. He really stands out of the crowd as an extraordinary performer and poet. The climax of his show comes in a mind-blowing, deeply unsettling and ultimately haunting moment when he is overwhelmed by the bottled resentment he has in him and by the voices of the ghosts that are taking over his head.
It must be said that this show is an acquired taste. There are moments when the art is more about the artist than it is about the audience, and this can make it hard to find a way in. That said, the experimentation in this show is amazing to watch, and the way it deals with such a difficult subject in a head on way is commendable. The show makes the audience feel in a way that most theatre doesn’t. It accesses a fundamental, animalistic emotional response to the material that is hard to explain. And this kind of experiential theatre is incredibly rare. If Electronic Voice Phenomena comes to a theatre near you on its tour, don’t miss it.

Sarah Lester's article on Electric Dada

http://www.electronicvoicephenomena.net/index.php/the-voices-in-the-radio-sj-fowlers-electric-dada/ ....... click to read the full whack
As the centenary of Cabaret Voltaire looms ever closer, poet SJ Fowler has been adopting Dadaist methodologies as a way of questioning our own preconceived notions. Drawing on Dada’s own sense of terror and menace, Fowler’s “Electric Dada” asks the audience to consider what it might actually mean to make contact with the dead. Or, rather, what it might mean for the dead to contact us. Far from hearing the comforting voices of our dearly departed, Fowler conjures up a profoundly more painful and unsettling affair. “Death has a language”, he sinisterly declares onstage, then, without waiting for an invitation, continues: “I will give you that sound.”

As Dadaists superceded formal language to engage with subjects that could not be understood outside of the abstract or the absurd, Fowler’s own sound poetry urges the listener to make their own connections between word, sound and meaning.   Transcending a language concerning death that is overfamiliar to us, Fowler’s ritual-esque vocalisations evoke magical incantations and otherworldly seances in words from a language of his own invention.  Fragmentary phrases, fields of invented words can bypass the author’s own associations and trigger new ones in the listener – it’s a Dadaist technique that was deployed in an attempt to overcome the subjective (bourgeois) ego.

If art appeals to civilised sensibilities and genteel good manners, Dada is the opposite. Dada – anti-art – was intended to offend. The performance experiments at Cabaret Voltaire (and beyond) did not lend themselves to polite rounds of applause, rather they stood for a rigorous critique of prevalent systems. Even so, when Fowler outlines the specific details of an artist’s exemplary suicide case for the benefit of all those in the audience who have refrained from committing suicide “for fear of making a mess” there’s no riot exactly, but there’s more than a ripple of nervous laughter. Like the audience of Henning’s performance of Totentanz, we’re not quite sure how to react.

EVP Bristol

Time for the city again, so important, back so soon after the enemies, and the cube is a truly exquisite space. How could this not be in the shadow of something as immense as the night before? It was different rather than lesser. A space to truly test the 'new day new work'. The greenroom was an attic bricabrac holecave of joy for me to play in, dance in, while Outfit shellacked. We all felt homely in the space. I could've felt really exhausted, body jaded, and with the material at times, unable to call down the spirit of the shaman animus monster lock bodywar, but I just smoothed that sideways. The first signs of tour cosh, tiredings, but not really. Such a joy to be around everyone on this thing, so much gentle brilliance, brightness, intelligence, creativity. Nice to be collaborating with Ross too, at claw, bear wrestle, and flesh out ideas on trains instead of reading / writing. Weird monolithic, premier innn, i name checked it live, but no one was hooked on that. Not everything can rattle like a sword inside of a stick.

EVP London

Bethnal green road back + forth twice. Another day beginning before it really began. This is the show that means the most to me. It happened, certainly, and a breaking point, where I no longer have a clue how it is. Others are positive, so it is all positive. I committed to it. I felt the (in)famous frost where I was used to some rictus chuckle from elsewhere audiences, there was less. a lesson here, but it was pressure, so familiar the ground, and the expectation. quite big actually. a night waiting on stairs, feeling tremors and then letting loose, realising niceness was needed to really spear. i did spear. people in lifts, im told, saying they wanted to run, that it made them feel ill, afraid. I fell back on what I can do, to eat up that drop. I had plenty of use for the disdain early accrued. All tied together in the end, I think, more than before, it fused, my works across the night, all the work really. We hoped it would when it should and it did, I suppose, if I can be any judge of that, which I can't. The less I know of this stuff the better, for I cannot know. When it does not die in childhood we can seal it off, return to the next. But still, some weight and I ended up with pub threats and massive eviscerating expellation of the gullet. The pints of cold coffy, lukewarm strawbshake and oliveoilberrysmoothie did not see the light of day. Other things did. Slept in my own bed.

EVP Brighton

One of the nicest walks of my life, strolling of the Laines to Kemptown with my shamanic cloak on my left shoulder. Friday evening and 100s see me, only a few notice, and they speak to me, with warmth. I love your coat, sweetie, I get in Kemptown. A car of girls, on their way out makeup, beep and then stop when I smile and ask me what it is. When I tell them, they are impressed, but seemingly not surprised. ub40 back to back on my shuffle. earth dies screaming and don't break my heart. powerful throwbacks. i listen to the full songs, more than once, which is rare with my impatience.you shoot me down in flames / You put me down a lot / But I'm giving you my heart / Go on take it / Please be careful not to break it / Just remember it's the only one I've got / It's the only one I've The expected perished at the basement, but it was a joyful experience, a stop between points in terms of my work, but the Pit in the Basement is that, and the intimacy welcomed a lot of adlibs. Apparently I've done the Brighton fringe and the Great Escape festival now. I was gentler, more responsive. I came here, Brighton, to recover after a big car crash, have family I love in the city too. A place that has been generous to me. Despite what people (cynical people, like me maybe) might think of as a veneer of falseness, it is a genuine place. I went with things for the performance, and things went with me. Had 2 grubbs vegiburgers. Holiday. The hotel was beautiful too. 

EVP Liverpool

Saint Georges Hall is a ridiculous place to look out from, into an audience. My mum tells me her dad used to take her there every saturday morning, this must have been in the mid 50s. More time in a city my family is rooted in but I never returned to until doing things with art / performance. The view from the green room is immense. A day of dressing room with Outfit, http://www.everynightidressupasyou.
com/main.php who are as intelligent, down to earth, brilliant a group of creative individuals self-coerced into a collective as I've met. I feel removed from the procedural responsibilities of such an undertaking. We consider the balcony for a thing. Still really scared for this one. Honor Gavin plays, really impressive  http://honorgavin.tumblr.com/ The whole tour lineup is a huge act of skill on the part of the producers, the acts are so radically different but wholly communicative, and they do speak across each other. The gore, a silhouette fudge, but it's fine. Colin Herd was kind enough to mail me, he saw Gateshead, was very kind about it, respect his opinion, helps to hear. Leaving Liverpool, staying at a hotel I've stayed at before. Threats in late nite tesco. I am as confused as I believe the audience were, which is a tremendous alienation achievement. I lay on the stage long after, bespattered, as they snapped pictures of me, and filtered out. The view was beautiful. See below.

EVP Gateshead

Groups of men in tight t-shirts, and I say men, those in their 40s, stared at me aggressively because I was wearing light blue trousers. The Baltic is a wonderful gallery. To play at the Sage is an achievement for me http://thesagegateshead.org/ We passed Durham on the train up, where I went to study, and haven't been back since. Three years of my life between Durham, Newcastle, Middlesborough, Stockton, Sunderland, Hartlepool, Chester-le-street. The train journey becomes the centre of what I aim to take in, the company of others, the experiential focus which allows me to put my own experience first, to appreciate the opportunity at all possible moments, to utilise the unique and challenging nature of the performance and its demands, and the company of those demands, to put the audience second, in order to benefit them. Met http://www.hetainpatel.com/ for the first time, a deeply generous and warm presence.

How to write the month spent writing my piece, the month rehearsing it, the unexpected but welcome discomfort at essentially having to confidently perform a touring acting theatre piece on a national tour to major venues with a few months notice never having done so before. How does that affect my private aesthetic experience, permanently, in the face of the inexorable contradiction between the intense engagement of performance and the dreary low of inevitable dissatisfaction? Doesn't matter. Lots of tiny changes made, shavings, prepared the Ash, the Animus, the call, the musicality and imagery. New shoes on, cut my feet to ribbons. The show went well, looking up, into the bowl. I'm told, repeatedly, the first one is the hardest. Is it? Hotels begin. The room sits in the middle of a pool, friday night in Newcastle.

Shaman electrique - a poem for the tour as it is being toured - #EVP

Shamans were once essential for the survival and wellbeing of Arctic communities. Are we not of a similar climate now, that such a necessity has arisen? Shamans are men or women who have the particular ability to communicate with other-than-human-persons. These may be, for example, animals, for example, BEARS, or the personified forces of disease, or weather. Shamans are especially important in ensuring that animals continue to give themselves as gifts to hunters. Without a shaman to intercede and negotiate with these powers, a human community is vulnerable to disease and starvation, even self-inflicted death. I bought myself a gift to reward myself for being so good, it is a gift I am giving to you. Latex nurse. French maid. Lingerie. For your body is not needed, rushing out into the unknown, out of the human world 

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Skeleton_Bear_(in_shamanic_transformation)_-_label_-_De_Young_Museum.jpg

handlingen is thus - collaborating w/ Lone Eriksen

Lone Eriksen is a Danish photographer of some wonderful capability and skill. She and I met a few years ago before she moved back to Copenhagen, and since then has been a valued link to that city. We first collaborated for Rattle magazine, and then did so again, for our longer piece Brumhold's diary, which took in notion's of photography about photography, novels about novels and which appeared in the following issue of Rattle, and will feature in the Enemies book with penned in the margins.

 Recently we have often been in touch and have collaborated once again. Lone has a photographer's sense of depth and space, and seems to pick up on my methods before I do, and thus was born a project which involved me eating into her beautiful critical commentary blogspace http://theactionisthus.tumblr.com/ and fashioning from it a poem, mulching text to become a new.

 the poem http://theactionisthus.tumblr.com/poem & from Lone on the piece ... 

 "The text, that is written in relation to the artistic work in the blogposts, should be seen as an approach to photography rather than absolute statements. I like the idea of disturbing the curatorial text and wanted to mimic the way that power is distributed on the internet through a textual dialogue. I contacted Steven, who I have collaborated with before and we agreed that he should use the text on the blog to create a new lyrical work. Here I should add, that the title on the blog point to a visual/textual collaboration we did a few years ago, in which the poem that Steven wrote starts out as follows: The action is thus - an icon is painted before us (...)

The poem title what photography is: light, colour and form completes the title of the blog, which now reads The action is thus - what photography is: light, colour and form.

The poem is made up entirely of words and sentences from the blog posts about Qiu-Yang, Gina Zacharias, Boris Mikhailov and Tereza Zelenkova respectively. The textual fragments from the blog posts are highlighted in pink and linked to the poem page. The contrasting colours, blue and pink halt my reading process.  

The curatorial text is cut into pieces, pasted back together and presented in a new lyrical form. Although the poem is also talking about photography it seems to be talking to the senses rather than trying to make sense. It has a mysterious performance quality similar to that of the photograph; I can talk about what the poem is doing, but I cannot determine and fix it's meaning. It's doing depends on the person facing it and the context of the encounter.

If writing is authoritative, then the poem present the curatorial text as staged and ideological. The dialogue between the poem, the text on photography as performance and the artistic works is playful, yet it is a power struggle." 

a privilege to work with such a mind and such an eye www.loneeriksen.com

anniversary of the rain of poems at the southbank centre

EVP eats the Anthony Burgesssss centre in Manchester soon.

http://www.creativetourist.com/articles/art/manchester/sound-art-art-meets-the-afterlife-in-electric-voice-phenomena/ ...h a “subliminal” message, purportedly concealed within the band’s recordings, exhorted two young American teenagers to “do it” and end their lives. The case proceeded, regardless of conclusive evidence for either the efficacy of subliminal communication, or – indeed – the alleged message itself. More tangentially, the evening is rounded out by S.J. Fowler channelling Dada’s metaphorical ghost, and Ross Sutherland, who combines “reclaimed” video footage with the spoken word; his looped clips of The Crystal Maze will doubtless summon some unpredictable manifestations. All in all, it promises to be a strange, unnerving and probably fairly noisy affair, though if you listen close, you might hear the voice of the now-deceased Raudive, vindicated at last.... http://www.anthonyburgess.org/

Maintenant #96 - George Szirtes


Conventional wisdom would suggest when a poet leaves their country of birth at a young age, for a new nation, they might bring to bear both traditions upon their writing. Perhaps it is possible, though arguably reductive, that the poet in question would be of neither nation truly - forever an immigrant in one and a stranger to another. What seems assured though, is that this sense of displacement, ambiguity of tradition and identity, this fundamental plurality of language and culture, would seem to find its proper place in the intangibility at the heart of a forceful and considered poetic, where such equivocality is not only welcome but perhaps necessary. At the core of the last century's European poetry tradition lies the notion of trace, of multiplicity, invention, migration and these are the defining characteristics of George Szirtes' oeuvre. His body of work, 40 years in the making and prolific in that time, has carried across forms, mediums, language and tones. It is the poetry of a singular individual extolling individualism, a poet whose responsibilities towards generosity and openness of spirit seem gracefully self-imposed across writing, translating, teaching, editing and anthologising. Moreover, it is the not the work of a man trapped between nations and histories, but one who has been emancipated by a lifetime's fidelity to poetry, never bound by a national dualism, despite the complications of being explicitly Hungarian and implicitly English. Author of over 20 collections, winner of numerous prizes including the TS Eliot, the Cholmondeley, the Gold star of the Hungarian republic and the best translated book award, George Szirtes is an immense poet and undoubtedly the greatest translator of Hungarian into English of the last century, if ever. In an wide ranging and generous interview, we present the 96th edition of Maintenant.


Alongside the interview, 3 new poems by George have been published, including one that forms part of his Camarade project commissioned collaboration with Carol Watts