Maja Jantar 

"Both of these pieces are early and rather crude attempts toward using poetic forms to arrange sonic material rather than linguistic material. Each of them represents but one of the literally numberless transactions that are theoretically possible. Consider, for instance, the number of possibilities for sonically interpreting the concept of "rhyme" alone. Would it be more faithful to the concept of rhyme to pair two identical sounds with different digital effects, or to pair two different sounds that evoke each other in some way? Can properties of duration, intensity, timbre, or tone make two disparate sounds rhyme? Or can the operation be even more esoteric: can the sound of a bell be said to rhyme with the sound of a car horn? What about the sound of a bird with the sound of a dog? In these pieces, I'm more interested in experimenting with all these possibilities than arriving at any definitive solution to the problem. ITALIAN SONNET is mostly concerned with formal structure: arranging ten second "lines" of sound according to the familiar form, I've chosen to interpret rhyme as mere repetition. HEROIC COUPLETS goes a bit further: again, rhyme is interpreted as repetition, but here the use of digital effects attempts to create sound-pairs ("lines") that are similar yet distinct, and thus arguably closer to true rhyme. HEROIC COUPLETS also attempts to mimic the rhythm of the iambic line. Both of these pieces are starting points that represent the merest edge of the possibilities in the verse-to-sound transaction; I hope they'll be starting points from which I can develop more cunning solutions in the future. Oh, and for the curious: the voices on HEROIC COUPLETS belong to Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Dalai Lama."

"It's a sound text piece using environmental recordings of a restaurant and a rusty swing set in rural Indiana."

"Catawissa Road is a poem of two voices; these Siamese twins look like this:

Catawissa Road

I have waited for him.  For want of a loom, I smashed furniture, slashed beds,

He's nuts: five AA meetings and he’s ready to breed, hollering waiting, a poor

My pa is dead: I got the sperm and the house housekeeper, his assessor and judge. 

let’s go. Here’s some perfume and a novel for scolding his journeys. Here in my

ya gal: My father’s dead; I watched termagant arms I ask him: why can’t he leave these

these five months as he died Trojans alone? I know he never wanted to go.

ripped the diapers off his ass at the end. Loneliness gone, something of

That’s death for you and creation comes after hospitals, sirens, and

I love you very much. one-eyed worms. Of the shards, cobbled,

dirty, we will build a tree as best we can for a bed.

I set my producer and musical director Bobby Perfect with the task of translating this visual poem to sound. We recorded the piece line by half line in two distinct yet related voices to reflect the structure of the poem on the page. The result of our collaboration is the sound file presented here."

"This is the first page from the first section of a new collaborative project by the two of us that systematically explores the nuanced veil of sonic frequencies, musical motifs, and choral/choiral environments beneath language. The whole work slips through words, falls, and oompalahs in circles until it returns with ancient grains in its earlobes and the dust of tomorrow sputtering from its open maw. This particular track is a plunderverse mix-and-mash text that we've overlaid through a technique that could be described as a literary version of John Oswald's plunderphonics. Two voices heard many ways, one sax player, and a hard slew of software. No maraschino cherries were worn in the making of this archive. I was going to go to college but I found that I already went."

"A voice synthesizer, some vaguely South Pacific computer processing, and a text created directly from the rough hewn stone of language itself renders this aural evocation of a sweaty robotic squirrel soul in the reverberant temple of love, or at least, the alphabet, the authentic pharyngeal post-Nostradamus prediction of the twenty-first century’s consonantal vowel shift."

"the lie and the reconstruction of sound belies the retrograded call of what is most immaterial.  material - inevitably - that the photoreproductive cues of the linguistic construct a soundscape that predicts what's known, already told.  the telling, in words that make no sense, signifies the vacuous, the obnoxious, the foreign.  insofar as a non-indicative, or paraleptical makes speeches, politics and reform is oblivious - the crystallization of its opposite brings interference and distraction.  the object (thing) bearing what little mind it manages in aleatoria, sutures."

“CHINA:  Found Tape

This project was borne out of a several year-long collection of discarded cassette tape retrieved from sides of roads.  The current installment are numerous strands retrieved in Beijing, China in the summer of 2008.  No strand is longer than 2ft.  The content of the tape is unknown until they are all spliced together and  and captured digitally via a cassette player.  In other words, all collected tapes were liberated from their casings.  The artist is interested in collecting this increasingly rare artifact and sees [hears] it as a hidden trace of the culture/environment from which he finds it. 

Technical Notes:  Some Digital Signal Processing [DSP] was employed to add richness toward creating an ambient piece for a broader audience.  However, most of the manipulated sounds occur from the weathered-state that the tapes were found in.”