The element of sound lives a self-oriented life.
–Velimir Khlebnikov
By the late 1970s, the Canadian quartet of sound poets, Four Horsemen, had become a feral phenomenon coast to coast. The group was an infamous and inflammatory presence in the Canadian and international literary underground and sound poetry networks. They were an explosive extra-linguistic force, captured in full corporeal ferocity in Ron Mann’s 1983 documentary Poetry in Motion, where the Horsemen perform their piece The Dreams Remain.1 This powerful performance is a visceral bacchanal of screams, grunts, growls, howls, chants, and guttural utterance; a corporeal collage of non-lexical expression that slams against the limits of song, poem, language, and speech. The four radical equestrians – Paul Dutton, bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera – were all equally committed to pushing the boundaries of written language to its breaking point.2 They had individually and collectively written and self-published chapbooks, edited mimeographed zines, and mailed hand-made broadsides since – and in some cases before – the group’s formation in 1970. It is from the unbridled linguistic maelstrom of the Horsemen that the publishing collective Underwhich Editions was born.
It was the Four Horsemen’s 1974 album Canadada that broke open the gates of Canadian avant-garde sound poetry for me and ultimately led to my encounters with the audile universe of the Underwhich consortium. My interest in the Audiographic Series (the audio imprint of Underwhich) became an obsession. I tried to track down as many of the elusive cassette tapes as possible, at first just to hear them and then to piece together the story that surrounded these fascinating sounds. I soon realised the group’s enduring commitment to collectivity resulted in a fragmented archive with a mercurial history. Over the years, many participants contributed to the endeavour, often managing a number of different projects and taking on various roles, both creative and administrative. I became a literary sleuth, piecing together a bibliography and discography from incomplete online databases, personal collections, library archives, and interviews. These documents continue to evolve as I unearth more works. Included in this article are the most comprehensive records of the collective’s output to date.
After a decade of doing archival work for independent record labels, the process of sorting through materials naturally became curatorial as I began to trace narrative and aesthetic ley lines within the diverse array of works. The result of this media archeology is Word of Mouth, a compilation of audio works selected from the cassettes that were released as part of the Underwhich Audiographic Series between 1978 and 1990. The compilation I have developed is in no way exhaustive, nor does it aim to represent the breadth of the series’ forty-plus releases. Rather, my curation attempts to outline a particularly rich area of experimental sonic poetics, exemplified by the compositional work of Richard Truhlar, one of the key audile architects of the series. His work will be examined below, along with a historical and critical overview of the series. First, some words about the motley constellation of poets and publishers that formed the Underwhich collective.
Between 1978 and 2015, a revolving cabal of irreverent Canadian avant-gardists, including all four Horsemen, collectivised under the Underwhich Editions umbrella, publishing a bountiful repository of books, leaflets, and broadsides, as well as producing language games, a microfiche compendium, a diskette of pioneering computational poetry, and many handmade cassettes.3 The group explored and exploited accessible technologies in pursuit of both experimental aesthetics and self-reliant means of expression.4 Although many Underwhich publications were printed at Coach House in Toronto, most of the collective’s early and ongoing contributors emerged from an underground literary community liberated from the corporate marketplace through the use of self-publishing technologies; primarily the mimeograph and Xerox machine. Correspondingly, in the world of audio, the cassette tape afforded formal and distributive potentials that were enthusiastically folded into the cooperative endeavour. Underwhich artists, writers, and publishers employed sovereign media technologies as a form of iconoclastic self-reliance, grounds for experimentation and innovation, as well as a technique for circumnavigating mainstream music and publishing industries, which, for the most part, ignored their formally daring works.
Underwhich announced an interest in the auditory in its inaugural year with the publication of Sound Poetry: A Catalogue: 111 pages of scores, essays, photographs, and capsule biographies devoted to the poetics of voice.5 Shortly afterwards, their sonic pursuits were amplified by the launch of the Underwhich Audiographic Series, spearheaded by publisher, poet, bricoleur, and sound artist Richard Truhlar, along with Steve McCaffery.6 Under Truhlar’s guidance the series released over forty albums of sound poetry, electronic music, out-jazz improvisation, and avant-garde composition.7 The audio series set the project apart from a typical small press engaging with expanded poetic form and emergent media technologies.
Despite the heterogeneity of sounds found in the series, all the releases are unified by sonic approaches that defy the constraints of genre, body, instrument, ability, or technique; instead they favour the affective sensation of “pure” sound, beyond the confines of musical syntax or linguistic representation. Although many of the releases inhabit divergent fields of experimental music, instrumental electroacoustic composition, and vocal sound poetry (unadulterated by electronics or audio processing technologies), the most compelling works in the series are those which syncretise these two compositional modalities. Judging by Truhlar’s own recordings for the series, especially in the duo Tekst with his partner Mara Zibens, this hybridised space is what excited him the most; an aural poetics that explores the potentials of extending and manipulating the human voice using home-recording techniques and electronic music technologies.8 Building on the asemantic glossology of fleshy utterance conveyed in communal jouissance by the Four Horsemen, the Audiographic series espoused a material flow of deterritorialized sound, exploring the hidden expressive possibilities found within audio recordings: expressive registers that can only be accessed with media technologies; a processual interlacing of larynx and electronics. In a sense, these works unveil a subconscious subtext of the human voice, beyond the limits of the performative body, magnified and deranged on magnetic tape.
Most of the Audiographic releases were recorded on home studio reel-to-reel equipment and duplicated in real-time on domestic cassette decks.9 With these self-reliant methods, the domicile becomes a recording studio, office, and factory; a layering of production space that is echoed in the overdubbed works themselves by the use of multi-track technologies to stack different takes in one recording. Richard Truhlar’s “Portrait of an Interview,” released on his Kali’s Alphabet cassette from 1982, is a playful tape piece that exemplifies this technique of manipulating and accumulating time.10 The work is created entirely from a fragment of speech taken from a recording of Canadian poet Sharon Thesen. The phrase “I’m afraid I forgot the question” is looped and repeated with slowly varying effects, similar to the phasing process used by American composer Steve Reich on his 1968 tape piece “It’s Gonna Rain.” In Truhlar’s work, the recording is played at various speeds, cascading and gurgling through swathes of echo. The speech is at times completely incomprehensible, folding in on itself, sounding like distant waves and synthetic murmurs. Slowed down, the voice drops in pitch evoking a male interlocutor, perhaps the interviewer, or even a divided self, questioning one’s own purpose for being interviewed in the first place, dissolving the interviewee’s sense of selfhood. The overall feel of the piece is unstable and disorienting, almost psychedelic in intensity, like the soundtrack to a mental breakdown, where language veers and careens out of one’s control, opening up fissures in identity and expression. On one level, the piece seems to soundtrack a nightmarish scenario, a kind of social delirium, and yet it is oddly calm and meditative, more like a revelatory experience where the content of one’s speech is lost, and immanent pleasure is found in the undulating tones of corporeal vibration. Sound pushes against the lexical limit, what Gilles Deleuze calls wailing: “A limit that can be expressed in several ways: the limit that separates language from silence, or the limit that separates language from music, or the limit that separates language from something that would be… what? Let’s say, the wailing.”11
A process – similarly innovative to that of recording and duplicating (dubbing) the audio at home – was used to create the covers (J-cards) for the Audiographic releases. They were designed by the artists and publishers using a variety of techniques and technologies that were both affordable and accessible: collage, photography, drawing, stamps, Xerox manipulations, lithography, and Letraset. The covers were printed using commercial copy machines in striking monochrome on thick coloured paper (utilising off-cuts from publishing projects whenever possible).12 The covers were printed on demand in small batches, saving the labour and expense of making large production runs and avoiding the burden of storing boxes of unsold stock; a method that echoed the manual duplication of the cassettes. Besides being economical, this process created a unifying aesthetic for the releases that drew on the mimeograph tradition in publishing as well as private press record labels, Xerox artworks, punk zines, and custom-issue cassettes.
The songs on the accompanying Word of Mouth compilation were gathered from a variety of sources: my own personal collection, Mara Ziben’s master reels, the artists’ personal archives, and a network of music enthusiasts who generously (or perhaps ostentatiously) uploaded their coveted cassette obscurities to YouTube. These digital recordings are the result of obsession, care, and munificent labour – a shared belief in the cultural value and artistic merit of fugitive sounds, as well as the importance of their preservation. The songs selected for the compilation follow a curatorial path laid out in the compositional practice of Richard Truhlar (as well as others involved in the series), outlined above, where the human voice intersects and merges with audio technologies, resulting in unheard expressive possibilities. The pieces included here provide an overview of some of the methods and modalities of experimental poetics used throughout the imprint’s lifespan. These methods include the use of reel-to-reel, over-dubbing, echo, delay, and rudimentary home computers to manipulate, stretch, supplement, invert, and synthesise the human voice. Some of the works skirt song, while others explore the possibilities of repetition and chant forms. Several compositions are closer to the improvisatory structure of jazz or the montage methodology of musique concrète.
Works like Tekst’s What Is The Sound of Smoke and Mara Zibens’ Bones surround the voice with layers of electronic texture, weaving eidetic discourse within a tapestry of synthesised sound.13 Michael Chocholak’s Okipa and Larry Wendt’s Zoo give voice to electronics, creating a virtual bestiary of chirps, calls, growls, and howls, a sonic environment populated solely by synthesisers and computers.14 Other works, like Truhlar’s Portrait of an Interview, bill bissett’s “whn i first came to vancouvr,” Paula Claire’s “Stepping Stones,” and Bob Cobbing’s “Fugitive Poem” revel in processual affectation, applying echo and delay effects to derange the syntactical codes of speech.15 David UU & The Avalettes’ Solar Mass, Steve McCaffery’s S.I.S.M.A. (Movements 1&2), and Michael Horwood’s The Pattern exploit the possibilities of reel-to-reel overdubbing and tape manipulation to create curious phonetic deconstructions and entrancing mantras of layered chants.16 In all these pieces the syntax is subverted, magnifying the nonsensical, sensual, and untold elements of aural communication. Collectively, the works, and their embodiment on magnetic tape, amplify experiential noise at the expense of syntactic signal, or as Friedrich Kittler calls it: “The white noise no writing can store.”17 As anyone who has spent time with cassettes can attest, the medium is veiled in white noise, shrouded in hiss.
The archival challenge that surrounds these material, handmade artifacts questions how they can successfully transition into the disembodied and instantaneous digital realm. What happens to these resplendent voices and their analog soundings when stripped of their plasticity and physical substance? With some degree of reproductive accuracy the grains and strains of diction can be translated into ones and zeroes without much loss of fidelity, but the depreciation is on the side of the listener, encountering a thinner audio experience. Have the conditions of limitless access degraded the attention span and focus needed to appreciate these sound-objects in their singular analog corporeality? In a Deleuzian reversal these works become organs without a body, dispersed weightlessly in the codified aether.
Whether or not the digital artifact can compensate for material loss with a robust distributive corpus, the fact remains that magnetic tape has an expiry date. It can endure only up until the point that the hydrocarbon molecular chains begin to deteriorate causing the reel to shed its oxide layer, peeling off in a distressing swan song of audile flakes. In this sense, the flow of somatic time is burdensome to this research on the mouth, clenching its jaw and muffling its tune. Although it is naive to view the digital archive as a carbon neutral space of utopic perpetuity, digitization is one contemporary method of staving off the accumulating noise of entropic decay, an attempt to preserve the articulate signals of these vulnerable media artifacts.
In writing about Richard Truhlar’s Xerox work Priapus Arched, Steve McCaffery claims that “there is ultimately no linguistic object, only a radically unsettled linguistic function and its even more precarious abandonment.”18 If this is extended to the verbal voice as well, then the abandonment of the semantic object, and its embodiment as material artifact, could be viewed as the aesthetic endpoint for Underwhich and the Audiographic works. Untethering the corpus could be the ultimate gesture of a literary endeavour suspicious of a stable semantic object. The digitisation process, in a sense, could corroborate an expressive release through a rupture of inscribed semantic and physical codes. The ongoing collectivity of Underwhich could suggest a rhizomatic form of preservation, a relational archive linked through digital space-time to an underground network on the iconoclastic fringe of internet capitalism.
Although Richard Truhlar is no longer able to add his voice to the ongoing sonic conspiracy that is the Underwhich Audiographic Series, he and his co-conspirators clearly defined their relationship with technologies, continuously seeking new media formats for their distributive and aesthetic affordances. The collective even saw the poetic potential of coding early on, releasing bpNichol’s computational poems, First Screening, on diskette in 1985.19 In their many experiments with new media technologies the Underwhich consortium demonstrated an innovative communal praxis that anticipated the independent distributive possibilities offered by internet-based counter-public networks like PennSound, Ubu Web, SpokenWeb, Troll Thread, Small Press Distribution, Bandcamp (before it went corporate), Soundcloud, as well as countless blogs, independent music labels, and small press websites. Even a brief foray into Web 2.0 with an Underwhich website, made during Paul Dutton’s tenure as steward, hints at the consortium’s ambitions to utilise the digital realm for its distributive potential. In conversations I have had with various members of the collective they are invariably enthusiastic and supportive of all endeavours to preserve, discuss, archive, and distribute Underwhich works. Over the years the collective has worked with many international artists and contributed to a global network of publishers, poets, sound artists, and writers in an unbounded effort to expand the reach of radical poiesis. Appropriately, today their radical works are animated by a trans-historic counter-public connected through sound praxis, continuing the anti-tradition that they helped forge.
APPENDIX A: Underwhich Editions Bibliography.
APPENDIX B: Underwhich Audiographics Discography.
Poetry in Motion, directed by Ron Mann, (1982). ↩
bpNichol had been running Ganglia Press since 1965; Steve McCaffery’s Anonbeyond Press had released a handful of fugitive publications since 1970; both Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera had published in and been involved with Ganglia/Gronk as well as other self-publishing projects. ↩
From the cover of the first Underwhich catalogue: the group was”dedicated to presenting, in diverse and appealing physical formats, new works by contemporary creators, focusing on formal invention and encompassing the expanded frontiers of literary endeavour.” ↩
A partial list of contributors includes Michael Dean, Brian Dedora, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, John Riddell, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Steven Ross Smith, Susan Andrews Grace, Richard Truhlar, Mara Zibens, bill bissett, and jwcurry. ↩
Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, eds., Sound Poetry: A Catalogue (Toronto: Underwhich Editions, 1978). ↩
Steve McCaffery was instrumental in the early phase of the Audiographic Series, guiding several release projects, but Richard Truhlar’s ongoing stewardship of the series kept it going for over decade. Truhlar’s biography can be found here as of February 11th 2024: http://www.richardtruhlar.com/About%20Richard%20Truhlar.html ↩
Despite Steve McCaffery’s Research on the Mouth launching the Audiographics series, Richard Truhlar contributed the most releases by far and was an ongoing curatorial presence in the project. Other publishers/artists such as Micheal Dean, Paul Dutton, and David UU also contributed releases. ↩
“Storing, erasing, sampling, fast-forwarding, editing – inserting tapes into the signal path leading from the microphone to the master disc made manipulation itself possible.” Friedrich A Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford University Press, 1999), 108. ↩
From an interview with Mara Zibens by the author. ↩
Richard Truhlar, Kali’s Alphabet, Underwich Audiographic Series, no. 14, Underwhich Editions, 1982, cassette. ↩
Taken from Gilles Deleuze Abécédaire produced by Pierre-André Boutang for French television in 1987. Hosted here as of February 11th 2024: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiR8NqajHNPbaX2rBoA2z6IPGpU0IPlS2 ↩
From an interview with Mara Zibens by the author. ↩
Tekst, Moving Human Coils, Underwich Audiographic Series, no. 21, Underwhich Editions, 1984, cassette. Mara Zibens, Trance Resistance, Underwich Audiographic Series, no. 24, Underwhich Editions, 1986, cassette. ↩
Michael Chocholak, Owl Man Dreams, Underwich Audiographic Series, no. 29, Underwhich Editions, 1986, cassette. Larry Wendt, Sound Poems For An Era Of Reduced Expectations, Underwich Audiographic Series, no. 5, Underwhich Editions, 1979, cassette. ↩
Truhlar, Kali’s Alphabet. bill bissett, Sonic Horses, Underwhich Audiographic Series, no. 10, Underwhich Editions, 1984, cassette. Paula Claire, Stepping Stones, Underwhich Audiographic Series, no. 45, Underwhich Editions, 1990, cassette. Various Throats Volume One, various artists, Underwhich Audiographic Series, no. 11, Underwhich Editions, 1982, cassette. ↩
David UU, Very Sound (Sound Poems By David UU), Underwhich Audiographic Series, no. 18, Underwhich Editions, 1984, cassette. Steve McCaffery, Research on the Mouth, Underwhich Audiographic Series, no. 1, Underwhich Editions, 1978, cassette. Audiothology 2, various artists, Underwhich Audiographic Series, no. 35, Underwhich Editions, 1989, cassette. ↩
Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 45. ↩
Steve McCaffery, North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973~1986 (New York: Roof books, 2000), 64. ↩
bpNichol, First Screening, Underwhich Editions, 1985, diskette. ↩
Special thanks to Mara Zibens, Paul Dutton, jwcurry, bill bissett, Steve McCaffery, Michael Dean, Brian Dedora, Steven Smith, and Simon-Cameron Fletcher.
Article: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Issue images produced by the media installation All We'd Ever Need Is One Another (2018) by Adam Basanta.