ulises carrion: the poet's tongue

Ulises Carrión's audio works clearly reflect his passion for language, its structures, sounds and meanings. He greatly enjoyed grammatically dissecting languages and trying to understand and explore their structures. His many initiatives and projects bear witness to his boundless obsessions with communication and circulation of works and ideas as a cultural strategy. This LP includes 'Hamlet for Two Voices' (1977) in which two voices read out the names of the characters in the Shakespearean play as they appear in the script, audibly representing the structure of the roles the characters perform. 'Poema' (1977) orally represents the structure and spatial characteristics of a poem, by listing all its structural elements: words, paragraphs and verses, etc. The LP also includes 'Aritmetica,' 'Three Spanish Pieces,' and 'First Spanish Lesson,' as well as the legendary '45 Revoluciones por Minuto', the grooviest track ever created within the context of conceptual art. All pieces, recorded at the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht between September and October 1977, have in common their refusal of discursiveness. They are not meant to be true or beautiful. Each piece is a series of vocal units that unfolds according to simple rules. Their beginning and end are arbitrary: they could go on infinitely. They should go on. They go on. First LP ever issued by Ulises Carrion who in 1975 'created' the legendary bookshop-gallery 'Other Books & So', the first space dedicated exclusively to artists' publications such as artists' records, books, magazines, postcards. Edition limited to 270 copies