The process

The process behind the collaboration is quite simple: Mr. Zloteanu records himself reading the poems, he then sends me the recordings and I proceed to carefully listen to them while I familiarize myself with elements such as theme, mood, cadence and rhythm, and I also clean them of any background noise or sibilance. I then choose a poem that I decide to work on and load it into my DAW. I identify key events in the narrative and place time stamps accordingly. I load a few plugins that I think might help underline the mood and theme of it and get to work on my composition. After I’m done I start carving room for the vocal track to make it part of the mix as opposed to just sitting on top of it so to speak. After mastering it the final track gets sent back for feedback to Mr. Zloteanu who has the final word on the matter. If he feels that anything’s missing or there’s too much of something, I get right on it and try to send him the adjusted version back the same day. I’m pleased to say he has yet to complain

Themes/styles

As previously mentioned, Doamne, te rog, scoate-ma la montaj deals with themes of addiction, loss, and pain but also love, belonging, and spirituality. The poems are very personal and very vulnerable. They give the listener the opportunity to dive into some of Mr. Zloteanu’s darkest memories where drugs and isolation rob young minds of bright futures, and where the authorities confuse sickness with villainy. Years of chronic pain inflicted by lousy doctors, loss of friends and family, and many other instances of obstacles on the long road to balance and salvation are interlinked with hope, love, and tales of actual human connection. I guess the question that one could ask after listening to these poems is “Does salvation exist without suffering?“.

With such a wide range of themes, I get the freedom to experiment and deliver a broad variety of musical genres, a prospect that my collaborator is very happy with. Ambient electronica, R’n’B, hip-hop, psytrance, and techno are just a few of the genres I’m eager to tackle in my pursue to provide each poem with its appropriate soundtrack.

Research

Before starting this project I did some research on poetry and sound, and to my suprise I didn’t come across any similar projects. Most songwriters are also poets, from Nick Cave and Jim Morrison to Lana del Ray and T-Boz. Many of them also find their inspiration in poetry, like Nick Cave for example, who stated “I have always read a lot of poetry. It’s part of my job as a songwriter. I try to read, at the very least, a half-hour of poetry a day, before I begin to do my own writing.” (Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files – Issue #25 – I know who the greats are, but who are your most loved poets? : The Red Hand Files).

There are also many musicians that find themselves so engaged with a certain poem to the point where they rewrite and integrate it into their music like Nickel Creek did with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Lighthouse on their track The Lighthouse’s Tale or Tiger Army and Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee.

I also found artists that would transform a poem into a song, by writing music for and singing the lyrics of the poem over it, like Romanian artist Nicu Alifantis did with many of Nichita Stanescu’s poems, or as a more recent example like Turkish musician Alper Tuzcu did with Pablo Neruda’s poem Con Ella, where he wrote a guitar track for the poem while Ecuadorian singer Micaella Cattani sings the poem’s lyrics over it. On this subject, Alper Tuzcu writes “Song lyrics tend to look for recurring sections, patterns, and rhymes, and they demand simplicity. Poems, however, do not always have to have this structure, or even reveal their structure at all. Both can be as freeform as the writer wishes them to be, yet it’s assumed that song lyrics will be paired with music, while poetry is often written independently of accompaniment, and may include its own musicality and flow.” (How to Compose Music Set to a Poem: A Case Study – Flypaper)

I also looked at Dr. Salomé Voegelin’s work and found myself somewhat inspired by some of her spoken word pieces, such as Moving Stones, where I found the use of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in the background very appealing. Yet I didn’t find any musicians, or sound artists that actually collaborated with poets not to compose a song together, but to weave music and poetry together as two distinct elments that complement each other.

Inspired by my research and findings I move on to understanding the themes I’ll be working with in this joint effort to transform readers into listeners.

The poet

This will be the first collection of poems written by my collaborator, Laurentiu Zloteanu. Here are a few words about him taken from http://artalibera.com, and also below you’ll find a few pictures of the visual work that he’s known for:

Laurentiu Zloteanu comes from Romania. He may not have come into this world, but simply out of it. Being an interdisciplinary visual artist, his whole existence is based on seeing the world through poetry, arts, music, movies and books. His final quest is to be at peace with all that is good and bad all together in this life. He studied psychology and the psychoanalysis of child and adolescent as a way of getting all aware of his own jump to maturity. Above his theoretical studies, he is really passionate about how the forms of addiction of drugs can lead people to spiritual transformations. His art is mostly inspired by the whole imagery specter of the unconscious mind. Both the use of detail & the power of the effects (of so many hours used at every painting) makes his art so vibrant, so electric (and almost kinetic) that the viewer can get really easy awakened, losing any kind of his or her sense of one’s self & implicit any sense of reality. One can discover in his art the influence of Alan Watts’s lectures, Jean-Michel Basquiat & Pieter Bruegel’s paintings visions combined with the expression of a single-minded  psychedelic culture & of primitive-art in all of the abundance of Laurentiu Zloteanu’s own contemporary style of a self-taught Artist.

Overview

For my first project, I will be collaborating with a well-established Romanian interdisciplinary visual artist – Laurentiu Zloteanu. Titled “God, please cut me out in editing”, it is a 16-piece audio experience tackling themes such as addiction, pain, loss, love, and institutionalization – a beautiful mix of poetry and music. The idea of the process is simple: the poems are written and recorded by Laurentiu Zloteanu, each of them a story in itself. The recordings are then passed to me, and drawing from a wide range of musical genres, I compose tracks that complement the rhythm, mood, and theme of each poem, adding depth and dimension to them. I carefully mix the vocals in, manipulating pitch and cadence, and experimenting with various effect plugins where the situation allows or demands it. Upon its completion, we plan on digitally releasing it as a music album on Spotify.