AS IN
somewhere between Ed Atkins’ "A Primer for Cadavers" and the music of Rebecca Saunders
I’m starting to suspect prepositions think quite a lot about murder.
As in, those tiny polyps of relation, brute stitches of language you’ve been throwing around so blithely might actually be killing you, just a little anyway.
It’s a terrifying idea.
Watch it happen:
“Subsequently, I wanted to say something regarding sex
and drains and in relation to us.
As in, it could well be the drains.
Or us. The smell a consequence of our peculiar
communion. Some invisible gaseous symptom, blurted
out in the rush of hob-heat.
As in:
I love you.
As in, I love you.
As in:
An abattoir in July.
Which is what I wanted to say—what I wanted to ask
in saying so: to ask, to imply.
You wield what is the equivalent to one of those bolt guns
for thumping pig’s brains off cliffs.
Or one of those pneumatic forelegs for riveting your
audience by the thighs to this chair.”
(Ed Atkins, “Us Dead Talk Love”)
That is no ordinary adposition. I suppose you could call it a preposition if you wanted, but it would be the equivalent of calling Art the Clown a birthday performer. Maybe it’s related, sure. But that “as in” has become something monstrous.
It’s spatial like a preposition, I’ll give it that—but how, and where exactly? It establishes relations like a preposition, sure, in that it jams whatever poor thing it finds on its left into the misshapen peg-hole of whatever lies to the syntactic right. But could you tell me please, dear, in precisely what space sex-smells, a slaughterhouse, and my love for you share some kind of conceptual essence? As in: what is the as-in place? And if each one of those is somehow insufficient, each one in need of another monster-adposition to recalculate it toward and never once found or satisfactorily achievable endpoint, isn’t the original idea (what even was it? who can remember?) being picked off, bit by bit, along the way? Just brutal.
So I really don’t know what to do with the as-in. We have left the realm of physical safety where a preposition links objects in space and time within the fixed, protected enclave of a dainty concrete world (as in: “Ed Atkins lives in Berlin” or “Rebecca Saunders is drawn to his texts.” As-in isn’t just a little sprinkled linkage between stuff, love. It’s making stuff up. As in: a mind of its own. An as-in space where things die a little, I mean, how else do you explain the way “some invisible gaseous symptom blurted out in the rush of hob-heat” becomes “I love you,” becomes “an abattoir in July?” It’s just idea (“sex and drains”), adposition, THWACK, new space (“gaseous symptom”), adposition, THWACK, new space: careening slope of wildly fluctuating interiors correlated solely by the desperate craving of the as-in to find the door that leads out back, shove the idea through one last time, and shoot it.
The violence of <—AS | IN —>, over and over again.
One idea spun out like a drunk motorbike.
As in a big bloody mess of burnt rubber spirals and corpses.
As in, an accident.
As in: how the fuck did we get here?
Rebecca Saunders is perhaps—I’m not certain; Clara Iannotta gives her a run for her money—the most singularly fixated grave-robber in the business. If nothing else, she’s certainly the most audacious: for twenty-five years now, she’s gnawed away at the Joyce and Beckett corpuses with the virtuosic self-assuredness typically reserved for undergraduate students, and it’s a testament to her craft that she’s managed to escape largely unscathed. For all the time she’s spent communing with insoluble cultural monuments, her own idiosyncratic voice has stayed essentially intact. It’s a feat. Most people would have been crushed. (I think it has something to do with deference. Saunders never bows to her source; Molly Bloom, That Time, Company, Still, Texts For Nothing, they all come to her and not the other way around. It’s gotten to such a ridiculous point that she’s virtually carved out Beckett’s “Stirrings Still” as her exclusive territory. It’s good preposterousness, you have to admire it.)
Knowing that Rebecca’s obsessive tendencies are selective to impossible standards makes any permanent addition to her library necessarily a significant one. There have been flashes over the years—Calvino, Stein, Jarman—none of which stuck around for more than a piece or two. But her upcoming Deutsche Oper project—scheduled for 2025, though you never really know with opera—will mark the fourth time she’s tackled Ed Atkins in five years; “Scar” (2019), “Us Dead Talk Love” (2021), and last year’s “Wound” are the other three, all huge pieces. It’s too consistent to ignore; she is, whether consciously or not, raising Atkins up alongside Beckett and Joyce on her mantelpiece. So perhaps it’s time to take Ed Atkins seriously from the musical side of things: to think about what exactly it is she sees in him, and what, in turn, the newcomer reveals about her.
Ed Atkins is already more like Saunders than his predecessors. He’s alive, for one (though death will ultimately be what binds them; just wait and see); and also an expatriated Brit who fled to Berlin and never bothered coming home. But where Joyce and Beckett are canonized Writers, Atkins is a video artist by trade. His installations are instantly recognizable for his trademark computer-generated protagonists—nondescript middle-aged white men, terminally onscreen, always in their least attractive form—trying so hard to pass as real, feeling humans, only to miss the mark of believability by a hair’s breadth. Their range of expression, most noticeable in the musculature of the face, falls just shy of being convincing, and this near-but-not-quite-human dimensionality sets loose a whole slippage of other aporias that send music, angle, and visual sequencing into a tumble. The only anchors—and even they’re too unstable to really function as such— are the long, bathetic speeches of the avatars, mumbling on through the videos in a squeamish mix of poetic virtuosity and total self-degradation.
These neurotic excretions of autobiography—which Fitzcarraldo compiled in 2016 under the title A Primer for Cadavers, a move that lent Atkins extraordinary credence as a writer away from his visual medium—are the texts to which Saunders is so partial. Even on paper, they’re visceral pieces that wallow in the linguistic equivalent of gangrene, acrid pus secreted from a squashed, hairy pile of flesh that has a surprisingly active knowledge of film and continental philosophy coupled with a strong case of Tourettes: it won’t stop cursing at you. As writing, Atkins’ work is often perversely beautiful for the same reason it is staggeringly unsettling: like the videos, the texts approach a convincing simulation of properly functional language only to fall short when the pressure’s on. Their desperation and subsequent failure to take substance in a world of flesh and blood beyond their screen is tragic—and at the same time, slightly comforting—to watch, and in the gap wrenched open between empathetic likeness and monstrous construction, a soft and suffered humanity limps forward, marred and bruised grayish-blue for having been accessed by way of the grotesque.
Something like this (from “Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths”):
“And meaning that us ponderous us's are frustrated by our own debt to some precarious lip of determined life.
Black curtain dropped. More an accident than stagecraft.
‘Here',
and the semantics of presence are borne out as demonstrative bags of flour or sugar, and one or two defrosted, sagging cod loins, held aloft.
Or swollen, obsolete telephone directories, on the verge.
— Swollen with the same name over and over: the hame of the ONLY PERSON that ever really mattered.
And these are redundant equivalents in this contest.
Presence is something we need convincing of via the complicated arrangement of the wet polygons, dear.”
Rebecca has chosen her favorite of these texts, “Us Dead Talk Love,” for the new opera. We are standing in the foyer of the Berlin Philharmonic (mere minutes after a devastating rendition of Kurtág’s “Stele;” she keeps shaking her head in astonishment and interrupting the conversation to sing bits of the final movement). I ask her how the opera is coming.
“Badly,” she cuts in, fussing with her trademark glasses. “I’m having troubles with my libretto. Specifically, I’m having a bit of a problem with the foreskin.”
—
Strange, to set “Us Dead Talk Love” and not think first about the foreskin.
You’d imagine that the subversive difficulties of staging Atkins’ omnipresent penis (and the eyelash found lurking beneath it, thin mascara’d ictus sheltered by a warm, wet tarp that sets him into an abject spiral) would have factored more heavily into that decision. It would be unavoidable, really, if you were thinking through staging; that’s what the text is about (well, sort of; it goes other places, but it only ever finds them by burrowing under the head). How do you not consider it from the get-go?—
—unless, of course, the content of Atkins isn’t really what counts for you. I have a suspicion that Saunders is drawn to Atkins for something other than his material, that while the compulsive, disgusted scrutiny of his own body and his fascination with the smells and textures of sex and decay are certainly an allure—color and flesh have always been her game—something further back and formal, something behind the text is what she really likes. Which is to say I don’t think it’s the what; I think it’s the where.
Saunders’ intense concern with space is well-documented. The spatial pieces—Yes, Stasis, Stirrings Still, murmurs, Chroma—are only the most conspicuous of a career-long preoccupation with sonic place. She has a few key words—resonance, acoustic, architecture, position, from which come secondary implications: light, shadow, distance, angle, density—which together make up the defining considerations in her treatment of sound. Her forms emerge as a result of the contingencies between sound and space, either conceptual or literal: how space changes the perception of a sound or, conversely, the way sound alters the experience of space. If pressed, Saunders will relate her music to slowly perceiving an object from all sides, rotating around a shape in multi-dimensional space and uncovering more of it with each pass (like the patient perimetric scan you make of your face or your thumb when teaching your iPhone to trust only you; tilting this way and that, gathering different angles, accumulating context, making a full profile). And while Rebecca Saunders thinks about space is neither a terribly insightful nor original observation, it’s crucial to understanding what she sees in Atkins (as in, to read Saunders reading Atkins). Space is her first sensibility; we begin with that.
Even on first reading—thinking about space— it’s instantly clear why Saunders has only ever returned to “Us Dead Talk Love”1 and left the rest of A Primer for Cadavers in peace (because it isn’t actually the book as a whole that interests her: Atkins is more formally chameleonic than suits her means.) Back to the where rather than the what: it’s the mode of organizing squishy substances that she’s after, not the substances themselves. If it had been, any number of Atkins’ more cumulative texts would have sufficed. She could have chosen “Material Witness Or A Liquid Cop,” an endless series of ors; “Or Tears, Of Course,” a towering string of ands; “The Trick Brain,” a prophetic pile of whens. She could have. She didn’t. I don’t think she ever will. Because polysyndeton—excess of coordinating conjunctions—isn’t so alluring to an artist who works in the minutiae of gradated space. Polysyndetic forms are predicated on engorgement. Each new entry forces them to redraw the terms of their spatiality in order to accommodate the increase in material, often, as is the case with Atkins’ lists, beyond thinkable space and into the realm of fantasy (this is the argument Foucault lays out in his reading of the Borges’ Chinese Encyclopedia. From the opening of The Order of Things: “What is impossible is not the propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which their propinquity would be possible.”)
Prolific accumulation—facilitated elsewhere in A Primer for Cadavers by the unhinged “and”—is distinctly antithetical to the narrow and highly restricted vocabulary Saunders has set out for herself. Her music, like her library, doesn’t accrue things; it accrues contexts that allow it to acutely position a radically shorn sonic profile in finite space. It is meticulous in its measurement and terrifyingly absolute in its decision-making; there is no room here for the hopeful glimmer of or: it is only as, nothing but as, as as far as the eye can see.
We are talking about the difference between conjunction and preposition, and/but/or versus around/inside/through. This is what that sets “Us Dead Talk Love” apart from the rest of the book and why it has proven such a fecund vehicle for Saunders: it is incessantly preoccupied with adpositions, not only between objects in concrete space but specifically between ideas in virtual space. As in: as in. As in, spatial relations between thoughts themselves (the formula [<—AS | IN —>] as a form in search of itself). Each articulation in “Us Dead Talk Love,” beginning right with the eyelash/foreskin and sinking down from there, is a re-contextualization of what came before it, not according to any systematic rule except for the violent, impossible need to clarify. Even in the short excerpt at the beginning of this text, the effect is immediately palpable: like Beckett’s aesthetics of failure, it is a continuous thwarting of adequate specificity—the linked prepositions can so quickly run the material to impossibly remote locations—coupled with the desperate attempt to achieve it, run out on a grand scale of devastation.
The effect of the adposition is thus a strange paradoxical double maneuver: at the local level, material is frequently diluted past the point of comprehension—as in, how the fuck did we get here. Globally, however—and this is the paradoxical bit—their excavation only increases the clarity of the space around the object, the thing giving utterance to the sound. That there is still, somewhere, an active place to which the ideas return to change their clothing is evidenced in the recourse to a prepositional speaker who isn’t quite satisfied with the local-level articulations. The more numerous the attempts to clarify or contextualize what is being said, the more aware we as listeners become not of the thing said, but where the thing being said is being thought.
Scholarship has fixed its gaze so intently on the measurable tactility of acoustic space in Saunders’ music that it has tended to overlook this place from which she begins thinking about spatial relations at all. The endless literary citations—her program notes encased in quotations and definitions, with a deference to writers whose work is rooted in formal play—give the lie: Saunders thinks about language first, followed only then by space as an emergent possibility from within the structural conceit of syntax as an extension of thought. We’re not talking about a mono-dimensional approximation of concrete space in language/sound—as in Andriessen’s distribution of the Hadewijch chords according to the blueprint of the Notre-Dame de Reims—but rather the thinking-space of language itself: how thought spaces thought. In this sense, Saunders’ spatial thinking is a prepositional one, inextricable from language as the means by which behaviors and relations give way to form.
As in: no wonder she loves DICTIONARIES so much. What is a dictionary entry except a loosely systematic collection of all the places in which it’s possible to think a word? Look at the opening of her program note for “Scar,” one of at least a half-dozen of her texts that begin like this:
scar /skɑː/
n. 1. The fibrous connective tissue remaining on the skin or within body tissue, where a wound, burn, or sore has healed. 2. A steep high cliff or rocky eminence.
v. trans. Mark with a scar or scars; to do lasting injury to. intrans. To become scarred.
ME skere, ON sker, skera, OF escharre, GK eskhara
Scar: stigma, cicatrix, lesion, naevus, trauma, pock and pit—marred, a mark of difference.
Memory, history, ingrained on the skin:
tracing a possible wound.
The implication of violence, disfigured and defaced.
The imperfect surface, frayed edges, cracks in the veneer.
That right there is a single notion THWACKed through time, body, place, and form, chain-linked together with invisible parenthetical as-ins. What did it tell you about the piece? Nothing. Also everything. In describing something about the nature of the material—“scar” privately suggests to her a denuded and precise subset of sounds available from within her idiosyncratic vocabulary—she is also revealing how it distributes its material in the space of thought. We’ve become at least subconsciously aware that “the piece” as a totality exists only in the sum of all possible spaces wherein its material can be definitively articulated—which is to say, in the adpositional space, the place where language develops spatial cognition for itself.
The only thing left for us to do now is attempt—and maybe fail—to excavate that total space, to see if we can catch a glimpse of the place where Saunders’ music comes from. We will have to risk death to do so. There is no other way.
—
Earlier I said that Saunders accumulates contexts—adpositions—and not things. I stand by that, but it comes with steep implications for the musical project as a whole. Adpositions do not have a momentum or a trajectory. The motion of as-in is incompatible with growth or discovery except as what is accessible from within pre-conditioned material. Accumulated context—the accrual of specificity afforded by excess of prepositions—is thus only ever a limitation, a stagnation, a hardening. It fixes, which is another way of saying it kills. Each new relation calcifies the possible space in which to think these objects, an exactitude that simultaneously removes from its material any transformative potential. The more it learns, the more restricted the options for escape become, the closer it comes to a terminus.
As in, Rebecca Saunders’ music is inseparable from death.
Atkins, at least, has already made this explicit. In an entry from “The Trick Brain” (the paragraph is dated with the year 2988), he could just as easily be describing Saunders as himself when he writes:
Your idea here being to make ossification the locus of production. Or rather, to correctly understand a becoming-cadaver as a becoming-productive. To understand that there is no emptiness, only the fertile residues and mulched forms that will provide the genesis for another batch of seedlings. These words for example, are every one of them synonyms for the material of manure. […] [A]ssert your cadaverousness in every way and at every point possible.
What I like best here is that Atkins emphasizes becoming-cadaver as fruitful in its own twisted way. And indeed, Saunders’ music, as it delimits its material, finds increasingly creative ways to gradate it, honing in on peripheral details until those too come into terrifying sharpness. There are things to be discovered in the becoming-cadaver, but they are not what the as-in turns up; the discovery is the as-in itself.
I suggested, when we began, that adpositions have something to do with death. Let’s take that one step further: retraction to the place of adpositions is death itself come to rest in an already weakened body. What Atkins is proposing, however, and he’s reinforced by Saunders here, is that becoming-dead is still a fecund thing to be becoming (he sounds like Eugenie Brinkema; there is no destroying form, only the generation of new forms).
Atkins’ sentiment also has a buried echo of Blanchot, who outlined in richer detail the profound strangeness of the cadaver’s sense of space (the book is titled, fittingly, The Space of Literature). I want to offer the quote here in full, not only out of love for Blanchot, my Northstar, but because the leap he makes between death and place is both a breathtaking one and perfectly applicable:
“Something is there before us which is not really the living person, nor is it any reality at all. It is neither the same as the person who was alive, nor is it another person, nor is it anything else. What is there, with the absolute calm of something that has found its place, does not, however, succeed in being convincingly here. Death suspends the relation to place, even though the deceased rests heavily in his spot as if upon the only basis that is left him. To be precise, this basis lacks, the place is missing, the corpse is not in its place. Where is it? It is not here, and yet it is not anywhere else.
Nowhere? But then nowhere is here. The cadaverous presence establishes a relation between here and nowhere. The quiet that must be preserved in the room where someone dies and around the deathbed gives a first indication of how fragile the position par excellence is. The corpse is here, but here in its turn becomes a corpse: it becomes "here below" in absolute terms, for there is not yet any "above" to be exalted. The place where someone dies is not some indifferent spot. […] The deceased cleaves jealously to his place, joining it profoundly, in such a way that the indifference of this place, the fact that it is after all just a place among others, becomes the profundity of his presence as deceased becomes the basis of indifference, the gaping intimacy of an undifferentiable nowhere which must nevertheless be located here.”
So much resonance here with Saunders and Atkins, but the thread I want to tug at is the care Blanchot takes to emphasize the quiet around the deathbed. Silence, he says, formalizes and delimits the cadaver’s monstrous sense of place. It is a precarious position, but a necessary one too.
The staggering presence of stillness in Saunders’ music is then no accident. James Saunders (they’re not related, sorry to say) has a nice, clean phrase for her sound-world that sums up the ubiquity of silence in her forms (I’m paraphrasing a bit): “a reduced palette of possible sounds shaved carefully off the potential sound mass, each balanced with the surrounding silence.” To that, I want to tack on a line from Robert Adlington about Saunders’ early work: “[Silence] is the ‘substance’ that endows the sound-objects with their imaginary materiality—their impression of physical boundedness.”
I have, for a long time, not known what to make of it. Of the silence, I mean. Silence is a changeable phenomena with behaviors totally determinate from context: the silence in Saunders is vastly different from the silence in, say, Sciarrino. There, silence is a threshold of the sound itself, a perceptual horizon below which activity is still theoretically possible but ontologically inaccessible. It is the silence of the inhale; held, terse, active. Sound beneath the waves. As in, it will come back up for air eventually. (For the most delineated iteration of this, see his Berceuse.)
Saunders’ silences haven never struck me as belonging to or extended from the sounds they frame. Notice James’ very careful wording: silence balances sound, it gives form to sound but is itself not sound. Adlington goes to far as identify it as a detached and isolated ‘substance’ of its own. The reiterative silence that frames Saunders’ music is a place sound goes that is distinct from the sound itself and yet not quite isolated from its syntax. It is something like a recalibration point, a place of return behind the instant of articulation where it can think on how to clarify its utterance.
Silence in Saunders is thus the adpositional space, the as-in working very hard to keep the cadaver in place. The emptiness between bursts of sound (behind-sound, Blanchot would say) is not empty at all, but what fills it is heavy nowhere, a great weight, a place. At this moment of writing I’m exhausted, utterly drained of life and eviscerated for having come here (it was always a risk) but here we are, at last, in the place where Saunders’ music thinks itself: it is a dark and empty nowhere which all these varying words I’ve spun and twisted and thrown around somehow cannot approximate in the singular. As in, Blanchot, one last time: “It is behind the world. It is that which the living person (and not the deceased) left behind and which now affirms, from here, the possibility of a world behind the world, of a regression, an indefinite subsistence, undetermined and indifferent, about which we only know that human reality, upon finishing, reconstitutes its presence and its proximity.”
This is not warm music, or if it is, the warmth is already fleeing, seeping out. (Nothing can ever prepare you for how quickly heat leaves a body when it dies.) By its insistent recourse to adpositions—the operational silence of the as-in—Saunders’ world is in a constant state of becoming-cadaverous. It returns to a nowhere that is here, a behind-the-here from which it tries vainly to articulate only to crawl back into silence when it fails, ossifying by degrees of limitation the thing it so desperately wants to pin to the floor. That it fails to do so adequately in the singular instant and is forced to move further into the peripheries of its object results in a simultaneous sharpening of the total space from which it casts itself towards what it seeks: it is petrifying, in both senses of the word.
Total clarity is often blinding, always frigid. The horrified shudder of the murder-mystery victim in the instant before death: “it’s you!” the brutal onslaught of bright clarity coming a split-second before it all goes dark. Saunders’ is this cold and definitive moment. There are bodies, but they no longer take joy in being so. There is shape, but it does not blossom toward a sun. Growth is never verdant but onsetting, the calcified remains of what-has-already-been-said freezing over in the virtual space of language. At every turn, Saunders’ sounds are aware of their limitations. They return to the adpositional silence behind in search of new spaces, new contexts through which to circumvent the inadequacy of their iteration and become at last whole, which all they ever wanted; as in, dead.
—
By way of a parting gesture, an excerpt from Beckett’s Company, a text Saunders reveres. Notice, as it slips away, the overwhelming presence of adpositions (which perhaps says something about what draws her to Beckett too); linger on how the suggestions of abatement couple with an ongoing sense of finality; and think, perhaps, in the final line, on how the what of Saunders’ music might exist only in the silences between:
“Some object moving from its place to its last place.
Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more.
[…]
Dark lightens while it sounds.
Deepens when it ebbs.
Lightens with flow back to faint full.
Is whole again when it ceases.”
—
If you find yourself in Europe, you have two chances to catch “Us Dead Talk Love” in the flesh. It will be at the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik in Austria on October 27, and again on November 19th at Huddersfield, where Saunders is a featured composer for the 2023 festival. Noa Frankel sings both performances, alongside Ensemble Nikel.
HOUSEKEEPING:
Preposterousness has been front and center in the literary headlines this month. The Norwegian author Jon Fosse, this year’s Nobel Prize winner in Literature, is well known to new music as a touchstone for Georg Friedrich Haas—Fosse himself worked on the adaptation of his Morgen und Abend, which premiered at Covent Garden in 2015 and gave Haas, I think, his best opera to date. When all the dust around Fosse settles (and carrying him around on trains looks less like a culture-grab), I’ll glance back through my copy of Septology and write you with some thoughts. Give it a few months.
For now, we’ll turn towards Dorothy Molloy, the Irish writer with a festered Catholic trauma that left venereal stains in weird and unsettling places on her otherwise quotidian poetry. I’ll be working from Faber’s collected volume, long overdue when it was published in 2019: Molloy died in 2004, having never seen her poems in print. The timing works out nicely: Clara Iannotta’s “where the dark earth bends” arrived home in finished form to Donaueschingen last week, its title, like all of her pieces, drawn from Molloy:
Mid-Winter:
Cut flowers in a vase this night,
Orange, golden and snow-white;
Dark green leaves and darker stems
Take me where the dark earth bends
In darkened forehead to the east,
Where Lucy lights the candles for her feast.
Already there’s so much to unpack (patience, patience) but if that wasn’t enough to encourage you to come back at least one more time, here’s Iannotta on the new piece: “I know that I cannot write the same music I used to, but I don’t know who I am yet or what my music will be. where the dark earth bends is about everything and nothing. It gathers scraps from somewhere in my future, beyond the curve of what I know. Reaching out of sight, I’ve collected possibilities that might be mine, or might be someone else’s, digging for a harvest that makes no sense.”
We’re in for quite a month.
The book is available, second hand, here; Iannotta’s music, including bends, here.
All for now—rehearsals in New York begin tomorrow for new music by Michael Finnissy with Loadbang. Then it’s home for a quick turnover—enough time to see Gramm and repack—before a weeklong residency at Cornell. I’m doing my first L’histoire du soldat there, and I’ve drawn mostly on Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for inspiration; make of that what you will. In writing news, next week’s VAN has a profile of one of my favorite singers in the business, who was as much a joy to talk to as she is to hear perform. Keep an eye out for that, and do me a favor and subscribe to VAN while you’re at it.
Though I hardly need to say it anymore (it must get old, hearing it time and time again), still, thank you, as always, for reading. As in:
you know this I love you
-tb
Notes:
Robert Adlington, “On the music of Rebecca Saunders,” liner notes, Rebecca Saunders: Ensemble Works, Stefan Asbury and Ensemble MusikFabrik, Kairos 0012182KAI, 2001.
Ed Atkins, A Primer for Cadavers (London: Fitzcarraldo, 2016).
—excerpt from “Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths,” pg. 182.
—excerpt from “Us Dead Talk Love,” p. 200-201.
—excerpt from “The Trick Brain,” p. 233-234. The italics there are mine.
Samuel Beckett, “Company,” Nohow On (London: John Calder, 1989): 15.
Maurice Blanchot, “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970): xvi.
Clara Iannotta, “Program Text: where the dark earth bends,” 2023, http://claraiannotta.com/works/orchestra/where-the-dark-earth-bends-2022/
Dorothy Molloy, The Poems of Dorothy Molloy, (New York; Faber and Faber Press, 2019).
James Saunders, “Interview with Rebecca Saunders,” June, 2006, https://www.james-saunders.com/interview-with-rebecca-saunders/.
Rebecca Saunders, “Program Text: Scar,” March, 2019, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c0e5bb4d274cbc2011b50bb/t/622f51fe5435a0007dabb668/1647268350979/scar%2Btext.pdf
(Curiously, her sung text for “Us Dead Talk Love” is only sparely from that text. The majority actually comes from Atkins’ “Air for Concrete,” but that’s a piece which runs itself ragged trying to fill up the chalky chasm between spoken word and aural reception; we’re back to the space of language, and the exception proves the rule.)