1.
With Irish publisher Beir Bua deciding to close its doors, I’ve decided to make The Voice Without, my pamphlet (or chapbook, if you’re American), free.
The Voice Without was written in response to the early radio experiments of Swiss-Canadian artist Christof Migone. Following his radio show Danger in Paradise, where he would bring the materials of radio to the fore (rubbing his hand against the mic, accentuating imperfections), he created a series of sound pieces titled Hole in the Head. If communication creates the illusion of togetherness, these reveal the alienation inherent within: “I was all alone in Radio Land and there was no one here to save me.”
As I worked on the project, I started to bring in grunts and growls. This led me to think about possession horror. For Charles Bernstein, engagement with language risks being taken over “by the bodysnatchers”. Following this, I started to think about language in terms of possession and exorcism. Do we possess language or does it possess us? When it’s exorcised, does something else flood in to take its place?
As an 18 year old I used to listen to this interview with Migone on repeat in bed at night, trying to get my head around the implication of its discussion for language and communication. Migone’s work had a profound impact on how I think about writing. You can imagine my excitement when he agreed to blurb the book, which you can find at the end of the text.
You can read The Voice Without here.
2.
In planning this, I also came across an old project called Assessment. It was written in 2020 and released on social media the same year. In 2022, I released it to folk subscribed to the Hem Press mailing list.
To give this ephemeral piece a degree of posterity, I share it here.
I was learning to typeset at the time and, while I’m broadly happy with it, the hyphen in the afterword wouldn’t be there if I did it now.
3.
All this talk of free shit got me thinking of my collaboration with Imogen Reid, Today is a Thursday, from Overground Underground Books. As the pamphlet sold out of hard copies, the (really great) editor Michael Sutton decided to make it available for free as a PDF.
You can read it here, and an interview me and Imogen did about the project here.