2. Space beyond words: voco-verbo experiments with tape

Chopin’s earliest known recorded work, ‘Rouge’ (Red; 1956) (Chopin Reference Chopin1980b), is the only recorded work that relies entirely on the vernacular of conventional language. This three-minute track is mono-vocal and much more straightforward technically and conceptually than the experiments that followed. Here, Chopin repeats certain words, predominantly the French word for red, over and over, in a forceful but lilting cadence, the words often gathered in groups of three with a pause of silence after a long run of utterance. As the recording progresses, the artist begins to roll the ‘r’ sound more overtly. Just over halfway through, he exposes the layering functionality of the tape recorder, overlaying multiple tracks of his voice intoning ‘rouge’ so that the word sounds are the same, but now as if voiced by multiple mouths, alternating in a pendulum swing of voices that seem to move in different directions. In the final moments of the recording, which he seemingly constructed using just two recorders, the words are still clear, but the layering of tracks has generated a dense wall of sound, a great contrast from the opening sections, in which the listener hears only the single voice and, behind it, silence.

In ‘Rouge’, Chopin pushes a simple word, albeit one that might evoke a range of secondary connotations, to the point where the repetition and subsequent layering makes the meanings begin to fall apart. In the poems he would shortly go on to create, Chopin eliminated language as a tool to get at this dissolution and disorientation. Instead, he begins to look directly to the corporeal and material texture of the voice, before or beyond language. The point for Chopin, however, was never to produce a poetics in opposition to language.

In his writings, he took pains to distance himself from the project of certain avant-garde artists also experimenting with visual and sound poetry in this period, such as the Lettrist circle in Paris. On occasion, Chopin even critiqued the ‘human sounds’ of a figure such as the Lettrist poet and visual artist François Dufrêne: ‘Speaking frankly’, Chopin observed, ‘I am not a howling or screaming artist. With the electric means available [through the tape recorder], it was not my intention to declare that there is no meaning, that words have no value’ (Chopin Reference Chopin1979: n.p.). His aim was not the wholesale rejection of language, but rather exploring how to parse new kinds of sounds embedded within or accessible beyond words. Chopin described this ‘beyond’ as the existence of an ‘other language’ (ibid.). Language can be precise, but it can also be broken down into small and large textures.

The voice, Chopin wrote, is ‘the bearer of a body that never ceases to act, a body which is a specific machine. Without a body there is no voice, whereas without the word the voice continues to exist, in all its corporeality’ (Chopin Reference Chopin1990: 17). Chopin here reverses the expected formulation of the body as the bearer of the voice. Furthermore, the body is described as a system: a factory, a specific machine. The voice is always embedded within the corporeality of that ‘specific machine’. In his conceptual framework for the audiopoem practice, Chopin thus entangles the space of the recording apparatus and the human body and expression. This is an artistic practice that materialises the ideas of theorists such as Don Ihde, who has argued that rather than separating us from ourselves, technology in fact offers one means by which we may understand ourselves as beings (Ihde Reference Ihde2002: xix). Ihde is not alone. Donna Haraway, like Ihde, takes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as a jumping-off point, inviting us to pay particular attention to the relation between the perceiving body and technical prosthesis that aid in perception. In the realm of vision, Haraway has shown how technical prostheses reveal that all eyes, even physiological ones, are ‘active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life’ (Haraway Reference Haraway1991: 190). If we apply Haraway’s conclusions to orality and aurality, we may surmise that the voice too is an active system of expression, rather than something essential or given.

Christoph Cox proposes that by reorienting ourselves to think about the materiality of sonic arts and ‘the powers, forces, intensities’ of which it is composed, we also open up new ways of relating to the arts in general, without recourse to distinctions like human/nonhuman, symbolic/real, textual/physical, and meaningful/meaningless (Cox Reference Cox2011: 158). For Cox, this reorientation allows us to ask not what the work of art means, but rather what it does. Chopin implicitly understood that the voice, like the body, is not something that we have, but rather something that we do. We may analyse Chopin’s manipulations with the tape recorder as a method intended to vigorously incite the listener to hear the body and voice as constructed: amplified, multiplied.

The act of listening is always active, directed outward – but also inward. As Jean-Luc Nancy has observed: ‘To be listening will always … be to be straining toward an approach to the self’, that is, neither to ‘a proper self (I), nor to the self of an other [sic], but to the form or structure of self as such, that is to say, to the form, structure, and movement of an infinite referral’ (Nancy Reference Nancy2007: 9). With the gaze, the subject is referred back to itself as object. In terms of listening, it is ‘to itself that the subject refers’, or refers back. In Chopin’s audiopoems, the sounds of the inarticulate body are resonant, given voice vis-à-vis the microphone and tape recorder, in order that that same body (and other bodies) might hear, which is to say might listen in, tune out, or mis-hear. Chopin’s interest was not that of 1950s and 1960s cybernetian’s network of information flow, but rather of the ghost in the machine – the thickness of vocal sounds, already nascent in the human body and voice, but amplified, released, and heightened through the mediation of recording technology. It is at the level of the thickness of vocal sounds that the interface of body and media technology transpires, and which Chopin makes audible in his audiopoems.

3. Spatialising sonic experience in the early audiopoem ‘Pêche de nuit’

Another of Chopin’s earliest compositions, ‘Pêche de nuit’ (Night Fishing; Chopin Reference Chopin1957), was made while Chopin was still living on Ⓘle de Ré.Footnote ¹ The title of this sound poem locates the listener in a specific context: an activity (fishing) that requires patience, relative stillness and quiet; and in a specific place and time (on a natural body of water or its shore). Moreover, these precise conditions suggest a narrow perceptual experience: while night fishing, one’s hearing would be heightened, tuned into shifts in the noises around one that might indicate a catch, or danger, or the need to be on guard. The surrounding darkness and isolation of fishing on the sea at night eliminate visual perception of the world. The subject must navigate through listening and through touch rather than sight. Indeed, at this time Chopin would frequently go out along the sea at night, practising a simple form of trap fishing using stonewalls and metal grilles. Traces of the experiential ambiance are audible in the completed recording. The listener may identify in the sounds of the poem a sweep of wind, the creaking of the boat, and the lapping and crash of the waves. The recording successfully transmits this overtly embodied experience in the world into the body of the listener by way of magnetic tape.

In this regard, ‘Pêche de nuit’ differs from Chopin’s mature production insofar as this early piece invokes more explicitly the site and sources referenced in its title. However, it is consistent with all of the artist’s work because its auditory environment was built up using just his own voice and bodily noises. There are no found sounds or external recorded samples sutured in; nor were any evocations recreated in the studio by electronic means. Instead, Chopin expertly manipulated his own voice, in conjunction with exacerbating the clarity and distortion of the microphone, and exercising the tape recorder’s ability to speed up, slow down, and loop, in order to achieve varied effects. The voice here became a raw material for artistic experimentation, with particulate qualities that artists like Chopin could mine.

Chopin’s earliest recordings typically retain remnants of language, including phonetic sounds, broken-down words, slant rhymes, or onomatopoeia, and ‘Pêche de nuit’ is no exception. In the opening minutes, the artist articulates quasi-phonetic sounds, the vowels distended. These stuttering, staggered ululations are quickly overtaken by ambient whines, whirs and plops, as well as more mechanical screeches and clangs. Chopin sought to elicit all the sounds he could summon: from cheeks, teeth, wind-pipes; accentuating the undulations of the breath; pounding and tapping on his chest and shoulders or other surfaces; manually opening and closing his own glottis in long expirations and aspiration, as well as inserting the microphone inside the cavity of the mouth, tapping it against his teeth, or otherwise affixing microphones to his skin (Chopin Reference Chopin2001: 118) (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Henri Chopin squeezing his throat and larynx to produce sounds for an audiopoem performance, 1990s. Henri Chopin Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy estate of the artist and the Beinecke.

The sited quality of ‘Pêche de nuit’ to some degree sets this early piece apart from Chopin’s audiopoems of the 1960s, which typically evade any traces of the natural world or their inspiration in embodied experience; the direct recordings of the artist’s vocal ululations and body sounds are so distorted, cut-up, or layered as to be virtually unrecognisable. At the same time, this audiopoem sets the course for all the work to come, spanning 1957 into the 2000s, for across his oeuvre, Chopin sought not to represent specific objects, people, or places, but rather to aurally embody something of the experience of being in the world. I open this article with ‘Pêche de nuit’, although this early work is something of an outlier, because in its residual echoes of the world, this poem instructs us in something vital and often overlooked about Chopin’s practice. Even at their most mediated, seemingly synthetic or electroacoustic, the source voices and bodies obscured, Chopin’s audiopoems do not escape the sonic texture of bodies, voices, and objects in the world. The aural space is navigated in the listener’s auditory sensorium, as if the ear becomes a room that the listener inhabits and moves around. Already in ‘Pêche de nuit’, Chopin invites us go night fishing in the mind’s ear; listening to this audiopoem is an experience akin to moving and touching in the dark.

4. Vocal micro-particles and ‘sonorous reality’

In the first decade of his career, Chopin aimed to produce electronic poems of maximal heterogeneity and movement. He principally sought to exploit the technical faculties of the tape recorder to see just how many different sounds he could capture, amplify, and build up through the recording process. Yet Chopin was an artist for whom the technological interface was aways a means of getting at the voice and body. He also explored performative strategies to configure the human body – the individual and the collective – in relation to the technical apparatus in ways that might maximise the kinetic qualities of the sound poem and the experience of its reception. The etymology of cinétique (kinetic), the term favoured by Chopin to describe his sound poems, alludes to these self-reflexive, physiological, spatial, durational and evolving characteristics of sound poetry as a new art form. It comes from the Sanskrit cyavate, to ‘stir oneself’, to the Greek kinein, ‘to set in motion, to stir up’, to the Latin ciere, ‘to summon’, to the Gothic haitan, ‘to call or be called’. Even in the charting of linguistic meanings’ evolutions, the act of voicing and of listening is never far removed from the act of creation.

In the process of creating ‘Pêche de nuit’, Chopin cast around for a way to notate the kinds of sounds he achieved, and through what means and degree of intensity, so that he might remember for future compositions. Initially, he wrote to the Lettrist poet Maurice Lemaître in Paris, who by request sent him sheaths of musical staff paper. Chopin soon concluded, however, that the particulate, non-linguistic plurality of sounds he sought to capture evaded musical or textual inscription (Chopin Reference Chopin1979). Eventually, he looked to the tape recorder itself. Chopin began to experiment with placing pieces of paper on the eraser head of the tape recorder to preserve an existing improvised track, even as he recorded another track overtop. He repeated this operation several times. Through this process, he discovered, one begins to perceive sounds that are impossible to transcribe through conventional methods of notation. The tape recorder became a means of inscription that is at once concrete – the material magnetic particles arranged on the strands of tape, which capture the precise sounds emitted – and in a sense illegible, except through the mechanical processing of the apparatus itself, which translates the materiality of the recorded tape into projected, audible sounds.

It was through the construction of his earliest works such as ‘Pêche de nuit’ that Chopin discovered these ‘vocal microparticles’.Footnote ² This discovery was not only about accessing the concrete materiality of the voice, but also about Chopin’s newfound awareness that the voice might offer a whole range of suggestive sounds operating outside the structure of signifier and signified so famously described by Ferdinand de Saussure ([1961] 1983: 101). Poetry speaks first and foremost as the body expressed in its own language: kinetic movement and sounds. This is a poetics attuned to what John Cage in 1957 called ‘new listening’, characterised not by an impulse to comprehend, but instead ‘just an attention to the activity of sounds’ (Cage Reference Cage1961: 10). But while Cage was most interested in listening to the incidental noises of the external environment, Chopin curiously attended to the activity of sounds emergent in the physical atmospheres of the body. In Chopin’s poetics of magnetic tape, the mediated voice – far from being an instrument of utterance and communication – becomes a ‘sonorous reality’, a site, a space and a materiality in its own right (Chopin Reference Chopin1995). The voice in Chopin’s audiopoems is not transformed by the mechanical. Rather, opened up and intersected by the tape recorder, the voice acts as a sound body. Chopin’s unconventional use of the tape recorder enabled him to visualise sonically all the particulate, material qualities of the human voice and body, registering not only its cadences and cycles, but also its auditory and haptic scaffolding, as well as the points at which it all breaks down.

5. Kinetic bodies: a speculative ‘theatre of the future’

One of Chopin’s more ambitious projects that explored the kinetic qualities of sounds is an unrealised proposal for an experimental theatre and sound performance that he called ‘Le silence lance l’air’ (Silence Cuts the Air). This early performance composition from 1961 lives only in the artist’s archives and has never been written about before. The piece, which Chopin envisioned at a larger scale than anything he had previously imagined, was meant to be performed in a theatre constructed of seven levels, each containing 100 spectators. Each level is formed from five smaller, synchronised levels of 20 spectators each. Several of these smaller platforms rotate in a circular movement, and are by turns illuminated and cast into darkness by the rhythmic pulses of beams of lights which, combined with the movement, create an impression of the spectators in perpetual animation.

In his notes for the piece, Chopin acknowledged his predecessors, noting the Futurists and Pierre-Albert Birot in particular, who had pioneered the idea of a movable theatre around 1918 (Chopin n.d.b). The ceiling in Chopin’s work would be movable, with the ability to ascend or descend, matching the intensity of tone and utterance of the audiopoem being projected.

Periods of intense sound would be interspersed with irregular periods of silence; the pulsating light and rotation of the stage is synchronised with the rhythm of the audiopoem. The performance notes do not specify the number of tape recorders, nor where Chopin imagined he would be staged to orchestrate this immersive multimedia environment. But it is safe to hazard, based on the artist’s realised performances, that Chopin himself would have been visible during the performance, serving as the conductor and focal performer. At the same time, he envisioned the audience playing an unusually active role.

The work was not intended to be entirely pre-recorded and scripted: Chopin also imagined that the soundscape would emerge in concert with the random accumulation of unpredictable movements, noises and actions of the spectators. The dynamic environment of the performance would, Chopin believed, encourage the audience to view themselves as active participants rather than passive viewers. Furthermore, each audience member would also shape the performance directly: the heartrate of each person was to be monitored, and the entire theatre itself would be mounted on a cushion of air (Chopin notes: ‘this is important’) so that it could be made to rise and fall based on the median heart rate of the collective spectators. The rhythm of the space, as well as the lighting, would then be scored and paced in real time throughout the duration of the performance. Chopin thus imagined an engaged audience within a space that becomes the work through the rhythms of movement (stage, lights), which in turn would be determined by the specific rhythms of the individual bodies of the congregated viewers. Spectators are not merely acted upon, but also acting within the unfolding of the work. Chopin’s interest in externalising individual bodily cadence – in this case, the heartbeats – and collective embodied atmospheres keys into the aural imaginary at work in his immersive, embodied audiopoems.

This form of embodied, physical, sonic feedback may at first seem to reflect cyberneticians’ descriptions in the 1950s of feedback as a channel that feeds data back to the originary control mechanism, enabling a system to self-regulate and self-correct. But Chopin’s work instead amplifies another form of feedback: heightened noise that disables the system when its own structural technologies are turned back on themselves. This is the figure of feedback that arises from the interaction between medium and media, commensurate with the account given by David Joselit in his reimagining of the complicated nature of video art. Writing of the ‘viral’, Joselit celebrates the darker side of feedback – of disabling noise that happens when a system’s technologies of communication are recursively turned back on themselves. He writes: ‘the purpose of viral aesthetics is to interrupt the smooth reproduction of a pattern to introduce shake, quiver or noise’ (Joselit Reference Joselit2007: 63).

In a theoretical text titled ‘Le Théâtre de l’avenir’ (Theatre of the Future), written around the same time as the proposed performance piece, Chopin equated aesthetic performance with the temporality, corporeality and mediality of everyday life (Chopin n.d.a). Chopin’s theatrical staging would be built not from objects, sets, gestures, or narratives. Instead, he claimed, he would create it from ‘words, modulations, speech, phonemes’ (ibid.). Chopin’s theatre of the future deploys all the peculiarities of lived experience reception, expression, creation and rejection. This project should be understood within a broader hub of post-war experimentation with the construction and manipulation of simple machines. For instance, in this same period of the late 1950s in France, Jean Tinguely engaged with related ideas in his ‘metamechanics’, sculptural machines in the Dada tradition which, through the mechanised and often frantic movements of normally static objects, were meant to satirise the explosion of consumer goods in advanced industrial society. At the other end of the spectrum, the slow-moving mobiles and kinetic sculptures of the Belgian artist Pol Bury were meant to increase spatial impressions through their graduated fluctuations. There is, however, an important distinction: the kinetic sculptures of Tinguely and Bury activate an external object body in space, whereas Chopin’s audiopoems and performances activate a set of perceptual relations transpiring in and on the physiological and sonic body.

‘Le silence lance l’air’ was almost certainly imagined as a speculative theatre of a future not-yet (perhaps never to be) realised. The highly technical demands and scope of this project, as well as Chopin’s well-documented absurdist critical turns (e.g., the imagined Festival of Fort Boyard, allegedly presented in the summer of 1967), reveal Chopin’s conceptual and speculative preoccupation with embodied and spatialised sonic feedback. The technical demands and scope of Chopin’s performance project, as well as his sometimes absurd or cunning projects (also including wry humour as in an audiopoem titled ‘Le ventre de Bertini’ in 1967, inspired by the rumbling stomach of the Italian arte nucleare painter Gianni Bertini, with whom he also collaborated), suggest that ‘Le silence lance l’air’ was a speculative experiment or concept piece.

With ‘Le silence lance l’air’ Chopin exhibited the same playful curiosity nascent in early works such as ‘Pêche de nuit’. If the earliest audiopoem sought to imbue the listener with the felt, sensory immersion of lived experience – fishing in the dark from a boat or the pier, on the seaside – through the mediation and re-creation enabled by the tape recorder, this speculative theatre imagined a performative experience in which the feedback loop of technology, human perception and the surrounding environment is amplified further. A significant aspect of this amplification may be attributed to the role of the collective experience, not only as passive spectators but also, at a physiological, sensory level, as active constituents in generating that performance. That this imagined mediation exceeded the technical possibilities of the 1960s, at least within the range of a small-scale artist, was less important to Chopin than the ways in which the imagined feedback loop of listener, environment and sound work might offer new models for thinking about the possibilities of creative practice, principally sonic but also more broadly in the forms of performance, art and the built environment, as will be evident in the text that follows.

6. ‘Erotic vitality’: performing the audiopoems live

As scholars such as Craig Buckley have shown in the context of experimental architecture in the post-war period, reconsidering media techniques of assembly, montage and juxtaposition allow us to think ‘about the changing definition of intellectual work and authorship’, not only in architectural culture, but also in experimental visual art (Buckley Reference Buckley2019: 30). Transnational experimental collectives such as Fluxus were also experimenting with performance, cut-up and expanded collage operations in Europe and America, and from 1954 on the radical approaches of the Japanese avant-garde group Gutai anticipated collaborative, performance, conceptual innovations to come in the 1960s. The interest in the collective, collaborative performance had long been an aspect of musical production, which continued to solidify in new directions vis-à-vis the prominence of broadcasting studios dedicated to experimental and electroacoustic innovation, as with the founding of Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRM) in Paris in 1951, spearheaded by French composer, acoustician and broadcaster Pierre Schaeffer, or in Stockholm in 1964, with the creation of Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), as the centre for Swedish electroacoustic music and sound art, which would go on to organise many live performances and festivals.

Chopin’s audiopoems were shaped by the limitations of what sound recording devices he could access as a solo practitioner working largely out of his home, amplified by his desire not to formally align himself with any particular group or collective. He did not generally have access to the professional recording studios of GRM or EMS, although on occasion he did have an opportunity to take advantage of those resources in Sweden, such as recording at EMS in the 1970s as well as presenting work live through the experimental intermedia association Fylkingen (Fylkingens arkiv n.d.). The more scrappy technical underpinnings of the audiopoems contributes to the more brutal timbre and visceral sound of Chopin’s work, and are also what enabled him to develop his distinctive style. The unpredictably physicality of re-performing the work live, in dialogue with the recordings, is yet another extension of these commitments. And committed Chopin was: he continued to travel across Europe into his eighties, in his final years, when he was navigating the effects of Parkinson’s and bound to a wheelchair, forced to rely more on the assistance of supporting sound technicians (Morton Reference Morton2015).

The production of the live audiopoem for Chopin was an evolving collaboration between the artist and the recording device, informed as well by the responsive role of the sound engineers and the idiosyncratic conditions of particular spaces. Before every event, Chopin would submit a list of equipment that he required to perform: two reel-to-reel tape recorders for large tapes with 25 cm reel, and speeds of 19 and 38; four loudspeakers; one or two amplifiers; one separate microphone for improvisation (stereo); and a technician to operate the master deck, who would astutely follow Chopin’s gestured instructions throughout the duration of the pieces (Chopin Reference Chopin1985: 123). He conducted his live audiopoems in several phases: first, a technician would establish the sound levels of the tape recording, which Chopin would conduct with particular arm gestures, indicating that the technician should augment or diminish the sound levels (‘my gestures are the baton that conducts the orchestra’, ibid.: 122). He might direct the technicians to add more sound values simultaneously, in addition to the effects of the pre-recorded tracks and his own improvisations in the moment. In some cases, he performed with multiple tape recorders, and on occasion would instruct the support staff to manipulate additional recorders at his behest (Chopin Reference Chopin1979).

In addition, Chopin would physically manipulate the tape reel live and improvise into the microphone, even as the already-layered pre-recorded work played. This method set his live voice and manipulations in dialogue – in counterpoint with, alongside, against – the recorded work. This doubling generated a frisson of unison and divergence. The recordings, almost always already thickly layered sonic worlds in and of themselves, would be made more dense – or, in some cases, elided, or even hijacked – by the artist’s live attempts to recreate the vocalising and body noises that he first recorded when building up the tapes (Figure 2). Thus these stagings were true performances, evolving in real time and calling on all the senses, rather than merely audition. The audiopoems were always already the products of intentional and chance layering, of improvisation, of listening to his own voice and body and then re-inscribing that listening. Indeed, Chopin would ‘dance with the microphone; on stage, recreating the audiopoem from memory as faithfully as possible’ (Carcano Reference Carcano1995). While his live ululations and interventions convey spontaneous creative vibration, they are in fact typically the result of a sustained practice of close listening on the part of the artist, intuitive memorisation and creative interface with the pre-recorded track. In this way, Chopin activated an unstable polyphony of utterance and the art object as multiple to an even greater degree in his live performances than in recordings.

Figure 2.

Henri Chopin performing at The Arches, Glasgow, Scotland, 16 October 2005. Photo: Bryony McIntyre, courtesy Arika.

Composer Dick Higgins, a core member of the experimental Fluxus group, and the figure often credited with coining the term ‘intermedia’, was an admirer and collaborator of Chopin’s. He equated the gravity of Chopin’s stage presence with ‘a powerful vampire, a super-Dracula perhaps, yet there was nothing malignant about him or his presence’ (Higgins Reference Higgins, Zurbrugg and Hall1992: 23). Instead, Higgins traced this power to the ‘erotic vitality’ of how Chopin used his body, especially in relation to the microphone, as well as the ‘curious abstraction’ of sounds that sustain an evocative intensity even as they transcend specific referents or meanings. He further traced the pathic element of Chopin’s audiopoems when performed live, drawing a term from linguistics, denoting the different expressions conveyed by vocal tone, gesture, or by body language rather than through word.

Fellow sound poet Larry Wendt described Chopin as ‘molesting’ the tape recorder on stage, wording that reveals the subtle ways in which the tape recorder comes to act like another body that is in conversation with the vocal and corporeal sounds of the artist (Wendt Reference Wendt1985: 16). In this regard, Chopin treated the tape recorder much like he did the body: as an instrument, richly varied, at times unruly and unpredictable. He also became attached to the particular character of each device, and when one of his tape recorders stopped functioning and he was forced to purchase a new one, there was always a period of adjustment as he struggled to elicit the same kinds of distortions, auditory texture and various kinds of incidental noise to which he was accustomed.

In Chopin’s performances, the artwork exists as multiple: pre-recorded voice, constructed sound poem, physically present body of the artist, and live voice and sounds. If language had long since ceased to offer Chopin the possibility of free expression, in performance the semiotic relationship of sonic elements, and their visceral, gestural, kinetic affect, remained.Footnote ³ Moreover, these performances keenly demonstrate the ways in which human audition is primed to detect human sounds even in the midst of extreme distortion.

Chopin wrote about the necessity of this engagement on the part of the audience quite directly, even offering direct comments about how to listen to sound poetry: when one listens to the body and voice made audible and multiple by means of technological amplification or manipulation, one should listen attentively in order to hear the interface at work. Indeed, part of Chopin’s project was to retain messy, fleshy, uncomfortable, and distorted sonic textures, rather than smoothing over uneasy points of connection and transfer between the human and the machine. The forms, boundaries and atmospheric qualities of sound poems may vary greatly, but while one sound poem may reveal itself ‘spontaneously’ (Chopin noted that this occurs only in rare cases), many require work in order to discern what is behind the electronic propositions, what elements are present in the echoes, reverberations and speed variations, to discover the orchestration, processing and movement (Chopin Reference Chopin1990: 18). Chopin’s live performances thus mediate the act of listening to a degree beyond that achieved in the original compositions. The artist presents the spectator with an even greater variety of elements to observe, aurally or visually; the audience may see the tactile building up and cleaving apart of the sound in the same instant as they are hearing it. The performance introduces a set of unstable relations between what is perceived with the ears and with the eyes.

7. Collective feedback: activating the audiopoems

By the 1970s, when he was living in self-imposed exile in England, following the failed 1968 protests in Paris, Chopin also organised his own events, which he sometimes referred to as Happenings, at his home in Ingatestone. Two to three hundred people would gather for several days, camping in the garden or sleeping in the ballroom or in one of the twenty-nine rooms in the large nineteenth-century home. Theatre, dance and sound performances were staged in the billiard room, which included a small stage, or in the conservatory, or, in pleasant weather, on the lawn, overlooking the extensive garden. The aforementioned Gianni Bertini along with the cut-up writer William S. Burroughs and experimental poet and performance artist Brion Gysin were among the many artists who attended and participated over the years (Morton Reference Morton2015).

Chopin’s commitment to creating spaces for collective sonic and performance experiences was, in this sense, pragmatic and literal. Yet the expansive sonic space and polyvocality of his own recordings was largely (with some exceptions) created in isolation: just the artist, time, the tape recorder and other simple objects for tactile, sonic manipulation, from matchsticks to tiny microphones. A rare exception transpired on 11 December 1971. On this date, Chopin staged a collaborative performance at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where for one hour he reportedly recorded sound effects on the tape recorder with the public and ‘created audiopoem improvisations in collaboration with the public, within the museum galleries’ (Stedelijk Museum Reference Museum1971). Chopin rarely used the term ‘collaboration’ in his writing or performance documentation, so it stands out in the context of this presentation at the Stedelijk, and suggests that this performance was truly unusual in that it was exclusively live. There is no indication in the performance notes that Chopin presented recorded audiopoems as part of the event, indicating that it was far more improvisatory than usual. He recorded his own vocal and bodily sound effects, as well as the noises of the public as they listened and navigated the museum galleries, and seemingly mixed, looped, distorted, slowed down, and sped up the live recordings to produce new audiopoem recordings that were more highly improvised and spatially grounded than his typical constructions, crafted in his home studio.

Chopin may not have been able to fully realise his imagined co-constituting feedback-loop version of the future of performance as described in ‘Le silence lance l’air’, but he reworked the ideas of the project over the course of nearly 15 years, across a variety of media. One circuit of this feedback was a poem called ‘Sol Air’ (Ground Air), which visually manifested his ideas in text on the typewritten page, published in 1963, two years after the initial project conception, in the penultimate issue of Cinquième saison, a journal of experimental poetry that Chopin edited from 1958 to 1963, and which afterward he transformed into a new audiovisual publication of sound, text and image experiments that he called Revue OU (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Henri Chopin, ‘Sol Air’, published in Cinquième saison 18 (1963). Courtesy estate of the artist.

Just as ‘Le silence lance l’air’ imagined a synthetic environment that would merge the asymmetries and rhythms of individual human bodies with highly sensitive technology, so Chopin constructed a similarly immersive aural environment in ‘Vibrespace’ (Vibrating Space) of 1963 (Chopin Reference Chopin1964). Chopin believed this audiopoem realised many of the ideas present in ‘Le silence lance l’air’, even if the fantastical technical mechanisms and audience involvement he had imagined remained speculative. The composition ‘Vibrespace’ submerges the listener in an auditory capsule that is by turns organic and mechanical. Rhythmic electronic pulses, rising bubbles, soft clicks and hisses dominate this nine-minute recording, even as a trace of the human voice remains: the huff of the artist’s intake of breath, wet clack of lips. We hear noises that approximate mechanised whirs, clanks and bangs, layered and interspersed with evocations of more ambient and fluid sounds that arise in the natural world, as if we are listening in on varied movements of wind and water.

The quality of the sonic atmosphere in ‘Vibrespace’ also produces an impression of containment. It is as if the artist and the listener have both been transported to a subterranean or underwater space, in which the predominant sensation is that of darkness and enclosure, twinged with pangs of anxiety, akin to the experience of listening to one’s own heartbeat clanging disproportionately loudly inside one’s head. The auditory trajectory of this piece reflects back to us the interplay between organic noises, the compressed space in which we find ourselves, and the unwieldy protestations of our own ears and bodies undergoing the process of listening to this piece.

Chopin released ‘Vibrespace’ in 1964 with issue 20/21 of Revue OU; later, in 1966, he released another, quite different version of the recording, titled ‘Le corps’ (The Body), circulated as part of Revue OU 30/31 in 1967. Finally, in 1975 (although the text itself is dated 1970), the Visual Art Center in Naples, Italy, published an artist booklet of the work which was modest in the simplicity of the design, its brevity (just 37 pages) and its petite size, measuring not even three-and-a-half inches tall. Small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand, this book returns the project to the scale of the human body, tactile, intimate and mobile. These proliferating iterations of a network of interconnected experiments – imagined and actual, recorded and live, manipulated and improvisatory, circulating on the page, by means of a subscription journal – may be understood as another attempt by Chopin to capture the feedback generated in the intimacy and distance between media and medium (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Composite photograph of Henri Chopin performing sound poetry and reading to an audience at a solo exhibition at Ceolfrith Art Centre, England, 1974. Black-and-white silver gelatin print. Photo: Peter Lathan. Courtesy estate of the artist and photographer.