I spent this past weekend with some friends at the beautiful Monarch Studios in Vancouver live recording a whole book of fungal-inspired poetry. Saxophone meets voice meets lots and lots of synthesizers. We went deep. We explored new dimensions of sound. And ancient themes of the underground.
Mycoglossia, which means ‘Mushroom Tongues’, is a collaborative book of poetry by writers Fiona Glen and Nina Hanz. Fiona, who is based in Vancouver, BC, performed some of these poems with me at a Mushroom Church event in Vancouver last year. Something about her Scottish accent and the dark and surprising language was transfixing for everyone at the event, including me. So I recorded her reciting about 5 minutes of the material and then started playing it back at Mushroom Church events all over North America, while improvising with musical guests to provide a soundscape for her performance.
One thing led to another which led to us both deciding to make an actual record. And in keeping with the aliveness of the subject matter, to record it live. No rehearsals and no edits. I invited some good friends - Zekarias Musesle Thompson from San Francisco on saxophone, Curtis Andrews on percussion and Chris Gestrin on synths to join for the adventure. We booked a studio in town for two days. Fiona and Nina (who is based in Berlin and couldn’t be at the recording session this weekend but will be on the final record) massaged some of the material from the book into 6 movements, gave us some prompts at the beginning of each poem… and we went on a journey together.
It was one of the most satisfying recording experiences of my life. Similar to the music I make live, it was entirely improvised. We finished the two days with a few takes of each piece and now the hard part begins. Choosing which version will be the album version. Luckily on Substack I can just post every version! Which is really what I’m trying to do on this platform. Allow interested folks and community to see the insides of this project and get involved.
I’ve included an unmixed live-from-the-board take in this newsletter. Paid subscribers can listen to the whole 8 minutes (and another version of the same poem below). Free subscribers get a tantalizing preview! In the future I’ll likely post all the takes we did here - and allow you to listen to the full fractal nature of what we created.
Find the whole book here
