Improv sound poetry with Gary Barwin...

Gary Barwin and I first performed sound poetry together in 1991. It was around that time we were invited to present at two festivals in Cleveland: the Cleveland Performance Art Festival and Recurrent Irritations. There is a cassette of our performance at Recurrent Irritations — These Are The Clams I'm Breathing, These Are The Clams I'm Breathing. I believe our material there was mostly scored, with maybe a bit of improvisation in some of the pieces.

We didn't perform again until last year in Hamilton. My own interest has veered more and more toward improvisation, which was at the heart of the work I did with the trio Donkey Lopez (RIP). So improv was almost exclusively on the menu for our gig in Hamilton, and then again earlier this month, when we appeared at the Kanada Koncrete conference at the University of Ottawa.

This clip here is the last piece we performed in our twenty-minute set.

Over and out.