I received a WhatsApp today from a friend promoting her upcoming group gig based upon Dada and the Cabaret Voltaire. This, combined with revamping my website and updating my Voice Over page got me to revisit the first time I ever got paid for my art. Not only was this a bizarre proposition that I carried out all too comfortably—but it was also a mistake—as became clear when I invoiced the client.
I was washed up in St. Leonards-on-Sea and of no fixed abode, having left the U.K. on the Eurostar for a connection from Paris to a commune in the Champagne region of France. It was an old converted convent with a rota of peripatetic performers, dancers, American expats who had never gone back, city exiles, and even a clown, who ended up giving me a lift back to Paris.
I had a ritual. I would walk down the hill to the supermarket every day and have a black coffee in the non-descript café. Then I’d walk back up. I enjoyed the anonymity of this. I had money in the bank. It was relative freedom.
Sometimes, I’d get the opening hours wrong though, especially on the weekends, and on my arrival there’d be a distinct lack of cars in the car park. On those occasions, I’d stop by the local bakery on the way back up the hill, and get a fresh coffee for one euro and a cake.
One day, I hit a rainstorm. There was nowhere to go, so I stood under a tree in a layby. Over the road was an old man in his garden. A few minutes on, as the sky cleared, he held his hands open and upwards, and gestured towards me, as if to say: “Look!”
It was one of those moments between two strangers in which words are redundant. Between us was the road, and we were united in that moment.
My debut album Mer-Made (2018) emerged during this time. I took the below disorientated video footage on my phone whilst lying down on a rock by the shipping yard on The Stade. Landscape to portrait; portrait to landscape. Herein was an inkling of the way I’ve come to deploy hardware as more of a subjective apparatus, than a mere tool.
I already had some of the songs on the album laid down. The rest would surface in a Scottish mountain village: an event which would prove calamitous but which is also the reason I am sat here now, and not there, writing this to you, and not that.
In 2018, I’d begun tweeting my services as a reader for hire. This idea, or at least the title, came from a brief book on the sensual art of reading by the French author, Raymond Jean, published in translation by Peirene Press, which I picked up in Luton airport on my way to Copenhagen in early January, 2018, mainly for the cover.
It was whilst staying at The Absalon Hotel in Vesterbro for several nights before moving on to my friend Bodil’s apartment, that I began reading Søren Kierkegaard’s A Seducer’s Diary (1903). I soon found myself recording it, and whenever I made a mistake, I’d start over. It snowed outside for days.
And rather than cutting and pasting extracts, or editing fragments of VO into one whole, this is still the unconventional method I travel by. It’s inconvenient to say the least but there’s an ethics of performance to it that is in sync with the way I make songs. The only way to deliver a reading of any poignancy is to be fully immersed in it. Or in other words, to inhabit it. I recorded under a red bedside lamp. The corridor was quiet. I then put this reading out into the world.
I was an avid Twitter user at the time and I knew a lot of poets on there. So I put out a call for ‘requests’, advertising my services as a #readerforhire. There was something meta going on here as the female character in the novel did the same. The project soon gained ground. It had not yet occurred to me to monetise it though, for, as is the case with much of what I do, the aim was exposure. And I love putting my voice out there. I’ve recorded fairy tales, avant-garde memorabilia, and voice overs for moving image. Taking a text through your body until you get it right slows down time. Dolly Parton has said in interviews how she has always held the guitar as if it was a part of her body—but over time, the guitar comes to hold us. For writers, I expect, so do words. I once said to a friend who complained of my ‘disappearing messages’ function being enabled: “They’re only words.” To which he replied: “But they’re not only words.”
I then tweeted a call out for commissions. I had garnered many positive testimonials and yet I was soon to be made redundant. A local entrepreneur in St. Leonards got in touch regarding doing an audio guide for the upcoming The EY Exhibition: Impressionists in London, French Artists in Exile (1870 – 1904) at Tate Britain. I thought this was a step in the right direction but after meeting with him for over an hour, it became clear he didn’t have the funds to commit.
I then had another request come in from an anarchist on Facebook who wanted something ‘playful and light’. I opted for the sound poem 'Karawane' by Hugo Ball. Ball first performed this poem in 1916 as part of the Dadaist Manifesto at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, opening offstage, and in the dark. Right up my street. The printed version below was later published in the Dada Almanach in 1917.
When I get an idea like this (which is more of a compulsion) I ride with it because it’s a reaffirmation. This is what I’m here to do, whatever it is, and doubt doesn’t get a look in.
I had to think a bit about what to do with the poem though. Many interpretations had been done, but what of melody? I was pretty well-versed in Dadaist antics anyhow having spent more time than I should have hiding out in the arts library avoiding any incidental admin that might have been thrown my way should I have been locatable. In the event though, I didn’t think too hard about it, and I think it’s pretty perfect as it is.
Everyone’s out. I get under the quilt. The poem’s glowing on the laptop. Its fat dark curly letters - ready and waiting. I breathe in, and press record. These decisions come in images. Why not just close the curtains, and make it up? But the absurdity of getting paid to sit under a quilt and spew beautiful nonsense penned by artists in exile over 100 years ago in the pandemonium of the wild Cabaret Voltaire was about as radical as it got, and in the aftermath, it occurred to me, I was getting paid to have fun.
This came in:
Her interpretation of Hugo Ball's sound poem "Karawana" sets a new standard for how that poem should be performed. Instead of relying on pure rhythm, she reveals the melodic possibilities of its nonsense syllables.
Frank Garrett, writer and translator.
If you are interested in my VO services please see my most recent commission for the author David Frankel (Salt Publishing) for a short, experimental film shot on 8mm, directed by Cathy Rogers which was recently screened in her studio in Ramsgate.
Sam was given creative freedom to interpret the text we had selected for our film. She gave us a haunting and expressive reading, combining perfect tone and clear delivery with an instinctive understanding of the subject. The result was a unique and spellbinding performance.
David Frankel