Ongoing news poem made of breaths and words. Sourced from the Today programme’s news bulletins on BBC Radio 4.

News Piece 9 8 2011 by holly-pester

News Piece 8th to 12th July 2010 by holly-pester

News Piece 16th to 19th October 2010 by holly-pester

News Piece 20th July 2011 by holly-pester

A Text Festival Publication with Apple Pie Editions

Jean’s moustache muffles his question
numbers
numbers may be scratched and his head is scruffy

Stay thermal
Sccrrruufff is Orson Wells burning it down.
Scruff tracking a tracking device
Scruff cherry is a secret agent
Jean’s got croup rough
panic hatching panic. little and green and pulsing
Don’t go over the top. Don’t talk into the wind

Fish for harmonies
Stay thermal in rough winds
Jean’s moustache is longer than we thought
Jean’s moustache is. Slick, shuffling out to sea

Jean’s moustache covers his mouth
Is a little green heart beat
Pulse pulse pulse. Roof. Blown. off

Jean’s moustache is ropey
Jean hasn’t got a moustache

Rough rolling through panic hearing panic numbers
numbers may be scratched with letters of human panic

A cherry
A sounds like ffffffffffffffff
like a moustache is vocoded
Cocccooccooooned in fuzz

Jean’s moustache plaits into other
Jean’s moustache is a Halloween joke
Jean’s moustache is theatre on air
Jean’s moustache hides a cocooned bat
Hu huuu
A cherry is a secret bat
Jean has fuzz
The wind sounds like ffffffffffffffff
Jocelyn’s moustache catches
Jean’s agent covers his mouth
Jean’s moustache is ropey
Scruffy

tough
trouble
tattle
tremor
twinkle
twinkle
tattle
terrible
tattle numbers
numbers may be scratched and fluffed

The back of Jean’s head is scruffy
Where the message backfired
Jocelyn’s moustache is cherry ripe
Ca-boom. Ca-bang.

Jean’s moustache is encrypted
The air around it is encrypted
Air type 1 scccccrrrrrrrr
Air type 2 is real panic, human
Elaborations of scruff. Real panic, human panic

the tune of thought
Elaborations of scruff. The oracle scruffed a sermon is scruff. The lines between L,G,M are scruffed: Little scritch, Green scratch, scruffy men in wetsuits tracking a tracking device. Hu huuu Scruff is part scratch part fluff with the remains of a flutter. Clash scritch muzzle caboom. A scruffed message is hard to hear > a massaged scruff is unhearable.

Jocelyn Bell hunting scruff
looking out for human panic.
twinkle
traffic
take me
take off
tatted
totally
twinkle
twinkle
tatted
tatted
Jean’s moustache is theatre
Martians roar
Earthquakes purr

Jocelyn’s moustache is cherry ripe
Jocelyn’s cherry is wailing
Jean follows rattles like a recipe. Find a bowl. Put on a wetsuit. Dive in.

Today’s cherry is a secret agent
Jean’s moustache is ropey
Jean’s moustache is vocoded
Cocccooccooooned in fuzz
numbers may be scratched into others
Jean’s moustache is a Halloween joke
Jean’s moustache scruffed
Little scritch, Green scratch
Hu huuu
Jean is Jocelyn Bell hunting herself
chasing martians,
becoming cuffed
making a message unhearable.

men in wetsuits tracking a tracking device.
Scruff is part part rough

tremor
tremoring
twinkle
twinkle
traffic
take me
take me
talkie
hu huuu
twinkle
tradgedy
trouble
tough luck
terrible
terrible
tremor
the wet rubber of those violins.
tweak tweak tweak tweak tweak

theatre on the air
Jean is Jocelyn Bell hunting scruff
looking out for jokes
Jean’s moustache is fluffed

The back of men in wetsuits
is unhearable

Jocelyn’s moustache is air-talk
Jean’s moustache is oracle
Cocccooccooooned in a green heart beat
A message is a hard heart beat
Pulse pulse pulse. Roof. Blown. Off.
Jean’s moustache is because of the wind
Jean’s moustache grows in the wind
The LGMs have throat infections – they cage noises
Little scritch, Green scratch,
Jean’s moustache is ropey
twinkle
twinkle
tattle
teetle
huu huuu
tanker
sounds in boxes. panic hearing panic tracking
take off
tatted
total Scruff
is a secret fluffed
and flicked

Jean’s secret is cherry chipe
a Halloween sermon air-talk
huu huuu

The air catches
Orson Wells burn it down.
Jean’s head is scratched-in
commentary is a joke

Jean’s moustache is agented
Jean’s moustache is by numbers

numbers may hide explosions
mid-air sounds mixed in boxes.
trouble spot
tough luck
Jean’s moustache is ropey
panic that flutters
cherry is a secret agent
Jean’s moustache is ropey
There’s no more cognac

little Jocelyn Bell hunting Orson Wells
It screeches, then steps out of character
Jean’s moustache is a system of numbers
Jean’s moustache is a little green scruff
Jean’s head is scruffy
Where the message backfired
Jean’s moustache is a
talkie
twinkle
tradgedy
trouble
tough luck
hu huuu
terrible
tattle speech
It screeches like the wet rubber of violins.
teetol
take her
take her
tracker
tracker
tracker
craquelure

tracker
take off
tatted
totally
twinkle
traffic
take me
take me
talkie
twinkle
twinkle
tradgedy
trouble spot
tough luck
terrible
tattle
teetol
take her
take her
tracker
huu huu
tracker
take off
tatted
totally
twinkle
twinkle
traffic
take me
take me
talkie
hu huuu
twinkle
tradgedy
trouble spot
tough luck
terrible
tattle
teetol
take her
take her
tracker
tracker
huuu huu
huuu huu
huu huuu

interview pieces by Holly Pester is licensed under a Creative Commons License

2
No one wants to see a bashed berry yogurt in the morning. On occasion it’s forgivable to tone two neutrals together. Soap and sack, rough water holidays. This fest is an ideal time to try some new samples – plucked skin is hot but to be daring is to risk a sterile ruby. Minus a shade or two for a proper century carpet, and now you’re really staining! A good fantasy fetcher is ¾ pig ink, a must-have for this corner space.
Feather the brick wash. You won’t regret putting blush before you’re 40. Make space, make time, the cherries are groaning. The crack of a new month is the perfect excuse for some fresh acid thinking. Why not update your alcoves with something musty. Your home is a mood-farm and worth every lick. If the dappled long coats get you down, sprinkle some fizz and relive the era of the mantle-piece. Something for sitting and driving: it should always make you roomy, a bit like a garden.

3
People of the watermelon, listen to the new sound coming from the angry red planet. Peach-wash or milk crust? This is contemporary California style. The new motors have a wonderful aroma and a mildness that agrees with your red-eye. Liner. So do yourselves a flavour and complete the decking in meat planks. Do it for your family, or just for the sheer fat of it. Life is certainly pleasurable now. It’s made of pure foam – Don’t ever forget that. Fact.

In the olden days a wife was a spread of bacteria. She knew the smack of pink wafer biscuit. Spray, spray, spray away the crinkles. Lip is the stick smart women should wear – says Andy McDowell, the glut agent. Today the trend in telephones is certainly to colour – in both home and the office. So why not update your talking shades? You’re a smoker, so American. Not a baby washer after all.
This bathroom is synonymous with the gracious living of Beverly Hills. It’s mulberry blush, it’s sandalwood and it won’t harm your pets. Want to know Paris’s secret to beauty in the morning? Cry a little. And there’s no need to plug it in, or even shake. To keep your decor in trend, you must follow the Johnson Plan. Step one is a Barbarella diet with two-tone salmon trays. Step two to three becomes available on Boxing Day. The most recent devotee has inched herself into 3 flesh sizes her previous. It could be you, so why not update your talking shades?

4
Feeling low? Blow away the brown air with a new internal wall. You’ve seen them in the showrooms; they leak real-life hormones. Halleluiah Jimmy. Now award yourself a twin-pack and really begin the neo year. It really really really will make your mornings bigger. It’s what every contempo doll is looking for. What is? This is! And you thought the bag-hogs had the last sample stitch. We all care about your lounge, Ronda. Believe it.
R-O-T spells luxury rug.

5
Monroes welcomes Baglics, the most recent member of the Vanity family. They insist on surfaces being bright and clear. Keeping up bright and across clear, ensuring a bright and clear sphere that’s bright and clear. The portals are bright and clear. The bays are bright and clear. They’ve customized bright to enhance clear, really bringing out the shine in the furnishings. The focus is on bringing out the bright, it’s clear. The design shanks are aren’t just clear, they’re brighter than clear, they’re bright and clear. And the rest. Bag-a-lics say, Come Alive! You’re in the coochie purse generation. That’s bright; that’s clearer than clear. Pimp your basement room ready for some grade A action. Hang up the stuff! Match faux fur with jaundice stones. And always make sure there’s plenty of peach on the blankets.

Presidents and Birds and Even by holly-pester

Programme notes:

At the conception of this project Kaye and Pester created a system of exchange and translation, developing shared concerns for chance operations, periphery speech sounds and the thrill of live performance. By trading sound, text and image material, they allowed the piece to workshop itself out of their (re)interpretation and (mis)translation. Kaye and Pester have engendered not only a musical score, but a hypertextual network of graphic notation, sound poetics and a prolific collaborative partnership.

The piece works as a triptych, with each instant both setting Pester’s text and also conceptually representing each visual poem. The piece is also interspersed with rhythmic interludes.

Baritone singer

Percussion 1 – Catherine Ring

Percussion 2 – Louise Morgan

To begin our collaboration Josh and I exchanged compilation CDs with recordings that we felt represented or at least indicated the direction of our practices/interests. My CD for Josh was a mix of sound poetry excerpts from Henri Chopin and Bob Cobbing, some experimental vocal tracks by heavy metal musician Mike Patton, a few songs from Bjork’s ‘Medulla’ album and some Mongolian throat singing. (And some pretty incredible Michael Jackson acapella!) Things that I like, listen to, make me think about the voice and the concept of singing.

Josh passed on to me an alien world of contemporary opera, some of his own piano pieces and pieces for many voices, plus a welcome reminder of The Velvet Underground’s ‘The Murder Mystery’. What did they tell me about Josh? That he likes inter-sections of voice and percussion; rhythmic, polyphonic vocal sounds.

After this we talked over our listening experiences and went to see as many exhibition, event and performances as we could, trying to build or uncover a common language. It became clear that neither of us were interested in the conventional poet-composer partnership, i.e. having me compose a text, hand it over to Josh and then have him set it to music. We wanted a collaboration that involved a continuous workshop and thought laboratory, that pushed both our practices forward, and gave away our personal artistic temperaments.

More than this, we wanted the piece to perform the exciting collision of text and music that was occurring in our dialogue.

We started by making a small collection of vocal noise. I recorded some ‘para-speech’ noises (erming, ahring, coughing, spluttering, laughing etc.) and Josh produced some piano bits and some of his own throat singing. Josh set this using some sound editing software and passed it back to me. I took this newly constructed sound piece and visually translated it into a sequence of typewriter poems. I passed these back to Josh who translated these as graphic notation, unpicking the flat plane of paper and creating a dimensionality that I found very exciting.

And this was how the process continued, passing back and forth sound, to image to composition.

Eventually I narrowed down the sources for my noise-making to YouTube footage of Barack Obama interviews, extracting those wonderful, distinctively pitched, vocal controllers he makes when pausing between words. I collected these, mimicked them and recorded them. I then juxtaposed this recording with impressions of talking pet birds (also sourced from YouTube). These sounds were arranged into the sound piece ‘bird interview’ which informed the body of much of the final piece:

Download audio file (bird-interview.mp3)

This suited our mutual creative interests in interviews, periphery speech expenditure and procedure-led art-making. It was also inevitable given my current fixation with the phenomenal sound of Obama’s voice.

While much of the material was still in fragments; typewriter poems, sound texts and annotated scores, we met with our singer, Alex and began testing some of the vocal sequences Josh had devised. During one of these rehearsal sessions I transcribed some conversations between Josh and Alex, discussing the technicalities of singing the score. These transcriptions were worked into another poem that was spliced into the interventional sections before each miniature.

I was continually excited by the way Josh interpreted the material we had workshopped out between us. One of the typewriter poems I gave him had solid squares of letters, which Josh – through the indetermination of  graphic notation – devised into a game for percussionists. This is ‘played’ in the final miniature where Louise and Catherine race to get to a certain note in the grid. Because of this each performance, although structurally identical, has an inbuilt facilitator for different versions. Both Josh and I place a great deal of value on the alchemic moment of live performance and were eager to make sure that there was something deliberate that ensured each time would be different.

The female percussionists work together regularly as a duo and had a wonderful energy between them. Josh’s vision for Alex’s vocals to be constantly struggling to break through the drumming was almost too successful. They embraced the vocal interjections Josh had written for them with a thrilling vivacity. Overall the performic dynamic between the trio for the final performance made it something of a visual and sonic spectacle.