Strange Punctuation

It was an enjoyable challenge to create Strange Punctuation, my first spoken word album.

I brought a manuscript of poems to the recording studio, along with some very old notebooks. In the first session, we recorded words only. In later sessions, we edited the original recordings by adding layers of other sounds to them. It was important to be associative rather than strictly illustrative.

Along the way, I discovered that editing sound is very much like editing printed words. You can add, subtract, rearrange the sounds in very much the same way that you can on the page. With sound there are other ways to edit. You can revise the speed, pitch, volume, echo and decay of the words. It was this discovery that prompted me to title the album “Strange Punctuation”.