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Frolic Architecture by Susan Howe and David Grubbs on Blue Chopsticks (the album artwork is a collage poems by Susan Howe)
Colour photograph of David Grubbs and Susan Howe sat at a table in what appears to be a dark-wood panelled church (or possibly library or university building); Grubbs is sat behind a laptop computer, while Howe reads into a microphone

Susan Howe & David Grubbs - Frolic Architecture

BLUE CHOPSTICKS / DRAG CITY

Frolic Architecture is the third collaboration by poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs, released in 2015. Where the previous works, Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007) and began with prose introductions that contextualized the poems' embeddedness in history, Frolic Architecture drops the listener into a soundworld that germinates wildly from this most multiple and heterogeneous of Howe's celebrated collage poems.

Looking at one of Frolic Architecture's poems on the album's cover, it's apparent why Howe initially thought the poem to be unperformable. For long stretches, it is impossible to separate Howe's real-time performance of her fragment-strewn text from Grubbs's further deformations, scatterings, and layerings. These aberrant vocalisations are placed in a landscape in which individual pitches pulse autonomously within thick chords; gravel and cicadas duet. There is no foreground, no background. Frolic Architecture is the most radical and abstract of Grubbs's and Howe's work together. 

 

TRACKLIST: 
  1. Frolic Architecture  [30:13] 

 

  • US import 
  • Housed in jewel case with clear tray 

 

 

see also: 
Susan Howe & David Grubbs - WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER   LP 
Susan Howe & David Grubbs - Concordance   LP 
Susan Howe - Debths   paperback 
Susan Howe - Concordance   paperback 
Susan Howe - The Quarry   paperback 
David Grubbs & Nikos Velitos - The Harmless Dust   LP 
Loren Connors & David Grubbs - Arborvitae   LP 

 

browse collections:  
Experimental & Avant-Garde collection 

 

 

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