what is left if we aren't the world

Reproducing here liner notes to a new CD released by Edition Wandelweiser Records containing realisations of Emmanuelle Waeckerlé’s score what is left if we aren’t the world: recordings from 2022—an early home recording, the premiere performance in Amsterdam—with one of the 2023 Klangraum performances, from earlier in the week, and a later performance in Thessaloniki, all with different ensembles.

Emmanuelle and I met around Eddie Prévost’s weekly workshops a few years ago and we discussed this score soon after it had been written. The following summer, I witnessed and took part in the closing realisation of this piece at the Wandelweiser gathering, Klangraum, in Düsseldorf, the weather humid, changeable and breaking outside. (I wrote a brief report on the festival for The Wire, but its impact on me goes beyond critical summary.) The format of the gathering involves pieces being performed—one might say ‘workshopped’—every day for an entire week. It takes quite something for a piece, however open the score, to sutain that amount of attention, but what is left if we aren’t the world more than does this.

Over the past few years, I’ve found the piece a way to think and feel about what it feels like now—it makes a cameo in a book of poems I’ve been working on for the past few years called On Musical Objects—and I was honoured to write the liner notes to this CD release (for which Ryan Dohoney also provides a typically astute take). As upcoming performances in the context, not of music, but of performance art, activism, and discursive practices, suggest, what is left continues to evolve, and I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing about future iterations.

Until we are done, until we feel or sound indistinguishable from what is there…

what is left if we aren’t the world?

Emmanuelle Waeckerlé’s piece is a placeholder, a holding place, holding space. A way to respond to the alarming and sudden cessation of social life during the pandemic—whether that was experienced as ending, as interlude, or as a kind of new beginning. The piece has its origin in a recording of Emmanuelle’s voice and the wind on a stormy night in lockdown: the voice alone, but not alone, the wind its own kind of breath, one that doesn’t need a body to breathe through, to keep going or to preserve. what is Left, the ensemble piece that emerged from this, is a way of collectivizing that aloneness. From I to We, always asking who “we” are; who is allowed to be “we”.

A year after the premiere in Amsterdam, the piece was performed five times at the Jazz-Schmiede, Düsseldorf, as part of the long-running Wandelweiser gathering, Klangraum. Lines were blurred between rehearsal, performance, and composition. Whatever their role in a particular piece, everyone is a listener, with listening a shared activity orienting us to each other and towards the world. The piece was workshopped: not as a precursor to something finished, but as part of an ongoing process, in which the discussions that surrounded the piece—how to perform it, what it means—are just as much a part of the piece as its score or a performance of that score.

what is left if begins with “pandemonium”, an explosion of sound which can be alternately joyous, explosive, or wracked, gradually fading out into a silence in which musicians and environment merge. Composed during Covid, it indexes that desolate time, but also the ways in which chaos continues to form the underlying, unstable ground of our equally uncertain present. This kind of collective catharsis is a space for grief as well as rage, and for the networked, swarm intelligence of collective sound-making occurring within the framework of a social relation of mutual attention and care. To go beyond ourselves whilst also digging deep into those parts of ourselves that we’ve forced ourselves to suppress, in order to go on: those huge griefs that, during the pandemic, we lived with and then had to force ourselves to forget; the ongoing griefs of the catastrophes we’re living through now, five years on.

I’m struck by the instruction in the score: “pandemonium [...], but not an apocalypse”. Because the idea that everything has ended is perhaps too easy, even as the possibility of planetary extinction becomes more and more palpable. How do we cope with an end that is not an end? How do we go on? The score opens at the moment when one doesn’t quite believe what’s happened, and continues into the moment where we try to hold onto the beliefs that sustained us up to this point, and to integrate—or to refuse to integrate—the new knowledge that trauma brings. “finding ourselves inside of something.” Finding something inside of ourselves. Keeping moving.

Within these sounds we hear the reflection of the horrors of where we are, all the things that block us truly being together—the anxieties, the cruelties, the hierarchies, the pettiness, the violence, the mistrust, the fear. But we also hear the possibility of what it would mean to be together, truly, glimpsed, briefly: a fraction of a second, a sliver of a sound.

Both the self and the tutti fall apart. And this is where we have to start. For after we figure out what’s left, the question is, as Emmanuelle says, “what to do?”

July 2025

Altissimo (The Cry): Preview

Sonny Rollins on the Williamsburg Bridge, October 7, 1961 © Atsuhiko Kawabata (photographer) /Hanako Kawabata. First published in Jazz Times.
 

A subscriber post on Substack, on the late Sonny Rollins.

There’s a radio recording from the Half Note in 1966 (or perhaps 1963, depending which discography you use): Rollins with McCoy Tyner, Walter Booker, and Mickey Roker, moving in and out of tunes at will; melody stacked free associatively on melody—rhapsody, in the sense of rhapsōidos, “stitcher of songs”, as if Rollins might play every song he knew, that act of association and recall a kind of survival force. Rollins was always walking around the club while he was playing, walking off stage while he was playing, playing within the form: having already begun as he stepped out of the taxi and walked into the venue, or deciding to take a trip up the stairs and out of the club to serenade Alice and John Coltrane in their home, followed by the remnants of the faithful. Sound bouncing off buildings, the walls, sound that would not be contained.

Walking while playing evokes the barwalkers, the entertainers of R&B, movement that refuses fixity; it’s a way of thinking, an exercise of freedom, a desite to get away, an impatience with the limitations of the form or the stage. This movement doesn’t translate to recordings; registers, instead, as a kind of sudden absence. In his unaccompanied cadenza on the Half Note recording, there are huge pauses as he moves around the room, testing the space: interruption, tension, void. All the more so given that these performances were broadcast on the radio, where they become dead air. But, rising again, resurrecting across the silence, Rollins comes back, the melody comes back, the force of remembrance, re-membered: a body put back together, gathering the limbs of Osiris. One tune becomes another, ‘Oleo’ to ‘Poinciana’ to ‘Happy Birthday’ to a newly abstract or abstruse motif: all those moments where what’s quoted and what is the thicket in which quotation occurs constantly blur and stretch, the earworm always within reach.

"and the music is unstoppable..." (Preview)

A subscriber post on Substack, on the great bassoonist Karen Borca.

Outside the by-now better-known names of free jazz, Borca’s work offers few external hooks or ways into the music: no Sun Ra theatricality, no Cecil Taylor ritual, no Archie Shepp radical traditionalism. It is a music that speaks for itself, and that demands a commitment of understanding on the part of the listener that moves beyond the merely illustrative. The music does not illustrate something: it is that thing itself. It asks the listener to dig as deep as the musicians dig, to stay with it, to sharpen their faculties on its sharpening invention. But to do so, to stick with it, is one of the richest rewards this music offers.

Borca’s music is work, in all its sense: playing as labor and as invention, the work of intense involvement with the material of sound and its transformation, dancing on the edge, dancing in your head; the work required by the listener to join the dance and be spun up too in it; work as in a product, a body of work, meaningful evidence offered up to the world as to the impact and beauty and grace and power of a person’s art, their contribution to the world. And as work, it seems to sing of the negation of work as exploitation and the emergence of some other form of situation, of invention, the rearrangement of the self in the multiple networks of the social, following the line, worrying it, seeing where it might lead. Work. Good news. And yes, the blues.

We can study this, we can listen to it, we can thrill to it, we can learn from it.

Poetry + Music this Saturday

A relatively spontaneous announcement of a relatively spontaneous gig: this for a new quartet combining poetry and music, with myself (poetry), Andrea Burelli (voice, poetry, perhaps violin), Lucio Capece (bass clarinet), and Stellan Veloce (cello). It will happen at the Casino for Social Medicine at Sonnenallee 100, Berlin, on this coming Saturday, 16th May, at 19h.

As a trio, Stellan, Lucio and I worked together twice last year, and that was beautiful. (Their duo at a performance a few months before the first of those occasions, after which I approached them to work together, was even more beautiful). As a quartet with Andrea, we’ve done one rehearsal so far, and I think it’s entering a whole new dimension, which I’m very excited about.

Also reading will be Tracy Fuad. And I’m excited about that, too.

Do come if you can.

More performances to be confirmed in due course!

J.H. Prynne (1936-2026)

Reposting here a piece which just appeared on the excellent online journal Little Mirror alongside Luke Roberts’ collection of Prynne memories. Many thanks to the editors. A longer and more detailed piece on J.H. Prynne will follow elsewhere in due course.

The poet J.H. Prynne died last Wednesday morning.

Jeremy was important to a whole host of us down the generations, for a whole host of reasons: politically, personally, and above all, poetically. For his avant-gardism; for his careful, critical, ethical attention to the specifities of poetic language; for his unorthodox Maoism, however that was understood; for his personal kindness and encouragement; for the kinds of permission his work opened up. Of the poems written during the period I knew him, the most important to me remains the life-work summary of Kazoo Dreamboats, written during the era of the financial crisis through the lens of Piers Plowman’s societal vision, via modern scientific textbooks, ancient funeral rites, and Maoist dialectics. A particularly treasured memory is Jeremy’s reading of a substantial portion of this poem to the student occupation of Lady Mitchell Hall, Cambridge in November 2011, alongside the veteran feminist campaigner and author Selma James. Insisting on making this a poem which could speak to the occasion and the political struggle, without compromising the fierce difficulty of the work itself, the reading was forceful and moving. When he read out the line “Rule One: people with top pay are rubbish”, the room was electrically charged, a charge that seemed to come both from the poem and to enter into the poem from outside. What I learned from this moment was that the poem itself does not change its context, nor does the context change the poem: but that their dialectical relation adds something to both.

Poster for the event hosted by Cambridge Defend Education at which J.H. Prynne read from Kazoo Dreamboats, 27 November 2011

Other works from these years that I treasure: the “bruised compassionate dismay” of Of ^. the ^. Abyss, a pamphlet I had the honour of publishing, which overlays Victorian child cruelty and the present migrant crisis; and the enquiry into the entanglement of British imperialism with poetic song in Parkland: a complex, insistent and direct enquiry into how the poet can sing when empire starves those other “fair field full of folk” elsewhere; a poem which movingly and deeply wants to believe in the possibility of poetry as lyric joy, but is totally lacking illusion about poetry as salvation; a poem that ask how the poet can go on singing their song when that song gets conscripted as the national anthem; that treats poetry with a near-devotional cast, yet radically questions whether poetry is morally complicit with corrupt orderings, if not actively harmful, then at least insufficiently attentive to or able to frame harm; a poem concerned with a national verse tradition, that ruthlessly interrogates the bases behind that tradition in the interests of a fervent, anti-imperialist internationalism; a poem rigorously dialectical, as dialectic is a practice of dialogue and question in origin, but as it is also the ruthless criticism of all that exists, and the very conditions for that questioning.

Cover to J.H. Prynne, Parkland (Critical Documents, March 2020)

Language is no innocent playground, yet the ludic is important to Jeremy’s late work (much of it published by Ian Heames’s Face Press), with its insistence that contemplation, play, and purposive activity be not separated. I love, too, the playful and unsettling rhyming poems of Snooty Tipoffs, the dense compaction of Al Dente, the fables and orchards and tales and streams of language that are the river all those late books swim. But maybe most of all I love the text ‘No Universal Plan for a Good Life’, a didactic summary in clear prose of the ethical position Jeremy believes poetry to hold, written for the context of people’s struggle in Nepal. I treasure both the text itself and the act of imaginative extension and solidarity it performs. And this is what I want to hold onto, about J as a person and about his work, this act of imaginative solidarity, this absolute belief in the power of poetry, this ethical rigour, this thinking through of the question of spirit and matter, this permission and this belief that poetry matters. I think I’ll carry that with me throughout my life. I hope I do so.

At play and at work there in language, into which he has now gone—at play and at work and now and then at rest—a life.

Wednesday 22 April 2026

Words and Music (Preview)

A subscriber post on Substack: three fragments from Daybook, on Mal Waldron/Jeanne Lee (with excursions through Shepp, Coltrane, and Gilroy), Jacques Derrida/Ornette Coleman, and Anti-Fascist Noise.

For Jeanne Lee, words and music were themselves always in dialogue, communication traversing the endless path of the semantic and non-semantic, the spoke and the unspoken. Talking drums, speaking tongues, healing water healing earth hurling air and fire. Lee’s first husband was the sound poet David Hazelton: in the mid-60s, they lived in Berkeley, Lee acting as editorial consultant on Hazelton’s magazine Synapse and performing in sound poetry events. After the couple’s split, and Hazelton’s suicide in 1968, poetry continued to be an integral part of work as she stretched away from the form of the standard or the song, improvising off lines of poetry—her own, those of Hazelton or Jackson MacLow or juggler, clown, poet Robert Lax—or, more frequently, going beyond words altogether. (“no words, only a feeling”, begins her record Conspiracy, working off a text by Hazelton.) “The thing about lyrics is that I stopped singing them because they no longer represented a reality I could relate to”, she remarks in an interview with Roger Riggins for Coda magazine. “the word becomes incidental to the sound […] But now I’ve come back to them in a totally different way, from the inside out.” For Lee, words and music mutually unsettled and mutually transformed each other. One of Lee’s former students remarks on her emphasis in teaching on “the musicality of words, the dancing and the movement of words, the unity of words, music and dance.” To Riggins, she speaks about “singing in a way so as not to be conscious of “singing” but just becoming a white light”.

I began to understand that this was another dimension. I began to write poetry again and to understand that the poem could be another reality.

Abstractive

Very pleased to announce the publication of Abstractive, a new collaboration between myself and Candace Hill Montgomery, begun in Sag Harbor in 2024 and just published by Further Other Book Works. It’s been an honour to collaborate and many thanks are due also to publishers CJ Martin and Julia Drescher. Please see the publisher’s announcement below for more details.

 

Candace Hill Montgomery & David Grundy

Abstractive

ISBN: 9780998460703
142 pages
Full Color Paperback
$34.95
April 2026

Buy Now

Praise for Abstractive:

“For Russell Atkins, the ‘psychovisualist’ composes structured relationships that can be viscerally felt by the mind’s eye. In Abstractive, readers learn to lean on the way those structures snare hidden connections: between visual and language arts, music and emotion, and everyone out there searching for the ancient heavenly connection. We are on the cusp.”—Craig Dworkin, author of Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality

“Here is vivacious visual and textual collaboration where melodic lines act as a counterpoint of philosophic riffing so that signification is expansively flung open delivering vantage points galore, tantalizing consciousness. ‘Form sets off everywhere’. We are treated to a cacophony in words accompanied by intense, colorful images. Candace Hill Montgomery and David Grundy conjure the living legacy of Russell Atkins and the results are exquisite!”—Brenda Iijima, author of Presence

“Candace Hill Montgomery and David Grundy set off a collaborative sensory sweep via these polyphonic and polyrhythmic poems, ‘ensorcellating’ an expansive tonality playing within and around image and word. These poems seek a mental music that ‘avoids fitting into the chord,’ ‘innuendoewing’ around the breakage of each eroding word. We are borne through the revelation of a doubled ‘mind in flight’: poetry as ongoing, unceasing dialogic process. Following Candance Hill Montgomery’s incredible long poem, Short Leash Kept On (Materials 2022), this is a thrilling and essential work.”—Geoffrey Olsen, author of Nerves Between Song

About the Authors:

The work of Candace Hill Montgomery spans painting, photography, installation, assemblage, textiles and writing. Making and exhibiting since the 1970s, Hill Montgomery was born in 1945 in Queens, New York, and now lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York. In 2024, she presented a solo exhibition, Pretty Birds Peer Speak Sow Peculiar, at Blank Forms, New York. Recent group exhibitions include From the Studio: Fifty-Eight Years of Artists in Residence, Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, 2025); Here Is a Gale Warning: Art, Crisis & Survival, Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge, 2025) and Reluctant Gravities, Hollybush Gardens (London, 2024). Her latest publications include the collection Muss Sill (Distance No Object, 2020) and Short Leash Kept On (Materials, 2022), a long poem inspired by detective fiction and the writing of Lloyd Addison and Russell Atkins. In 2023, a major essay on her work, “Candace Hill-Montgomery, Against Containment” by Amy Tobin, was published in Art History, Volume 46. She is represented by Hollybush Gardens in London and will present her first solo exhibition with the gallery in June 2026.

David Grundy is a poet and scholar. He is the author of the critical books A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and San Francisco, 1944–Present (Oxford University Press, 2024); A True Account (The 87 Press, 2023), a book of poetry; and Present Continuous (Pamenar Press, 2022), a book of lyric essays; and co-editor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). He runs the small press Materials.