Review: Your Devotee in Rags, a sonic poetry collaboration by Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman
Review by Luca de la Lune
Your Devotee in Rags truly is a voracious visage of passionate construction. Exotic soundstages tumble unfettered around thunderous drum breaks and wholly convincing vocal performances. The narrative is female - is woman. Churning laments championed by steaming percussion drive us through moments, memories, patriarchy. The narrator is hungry. The voice is visceral, snarling.
Your Devotee in Rags takes place in a brutalist landscape, bloody and hard-fought—yet through the eyes of our narrator, there is hope and a cathartic solace. My favourite track on the record occurs halfway through: 'to never have enough, be enough, get enough' rolls repeatedly from a cursive maw, comforting you in how casually it makes you feel seen. Hypnotically coherent it lands a dagger and twists it with persistence. As an album it is symbiotic. The sawtooth synthesizers bite in tandem with our protagonists chomping barbs. A familiar, telephone-like distortion frequently warms vocals and instruments alike. Drones and Sirens haunt from both ends of the frequency spectrum. It is a complete experience. A mature sense of structure skillfully coddles the raw chaos. I predict the journey it takes each listener on would be totally unique. immeasurably useful and changing; thus, I would recommend this album to anyone.
Your Devotee in Rags from Sonic Recordings, 2024.
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More about Your Devotee in Rags:
Your Devotee in Rags is a sonic poetry collaboration between Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman; an act of desire and metamorphosis expanding the performative vision of being at the horizon of new experience, stripped down, exploring the turf, through poetry and spiritual yearning.
More about Anne Waldman:
Anne Waldman is a living legend. Poet, performer, professor, editor, cultural activist, grandmother, and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Former director of the Poetry Project. Tireless author of over 40 books, her trademark energy coils ever outward, always seeking to reveal the four-fold vision that we have largely lost.
More about Andrew Whiteman:
Andrew Whiteman is a musician and mythopoetics scholar from Montreal, Canada. He writes and performs in Broken Social Scene, Apostle of Hustle, AroarA, and Poets’ Workout Sound System. He is a co-founder of Siren Recordings.
Siren Recordings is a digital, multimodal platform that operates as boutique, studio, and archive. We seek to connect scholars, artists, and lovers of sonic poetry in an online community. Following Ed Sanders, we believe that perfection comes in the poetic triad: “the spoken text/the text as beauteously presented on the page/the text as performed.” We incorporate elements of sound and music into recordings of poetry performances to emphasize the affective, social experience of poetic work.
We value experimentation in form, both contemporary and modern. We renew older poetic works by treating the archive as a participant in the work we are making; archival play ensures that our releases blend contemporary technology with influential poetry. These values seek to serve one, ultimate goal: to contribute to the siren call that warns of the diminishing time we spend in the archaic situation of gathering to hear someone speak.