Mythscience Records, a label arkiving necessary voices for us all to learn from. Poet Harmony Holiday spearheads the venture and has assembled a taster of the poetry and jazz featuring Amiri Baraka and other master-teachers. We urge you to donate generously and download the drum talk.
“In an ongoing effort to showcase and enact the symbiosis between listening and writing, between poetics and recording, between making records and writing books, between the rhythm of thought and the rhythm of speech, between archiving and sampling, between collective improvisation and true understanding, this is the first installment of what will be a long series of digital and analog releases of poetry and poetics recordings. The emphasis is on close listening to well-trained readers, writers, thinkers, artists, who are able to bring language through the voice in modes that transcend affect. What makes these recordings so pleasurable is their unflinching sincerity, their sober time signature, they are not trying to be anything, and with such modest intentions, they accomplish divine tonalities.
The power of speech was widely acknowledged in the 60s on labels like Motown’s subsidiary, Black Forum, and people paid attention to their personal and public rhetoric across all genres and artistic and lifestyle practices, as the tense political climate demanded that all speech achieve the level of purpose and urgency that poetry gives us. We are in a similar political climate today, yet the crass permutations in language use, the new contexts that language is invading and being flattened by, are causing a denial of the power of meaningful and sincere communication. Only by training ourselves to listen again will we even begin to recognize the abject robotics of popular speech today, and poetry and poetics encourage that skillful listening that might have the capacity to bring us back to ourselves.”
Download: An essential sanity, black and electric.
Mythscience Records: The First Five LPs
Amiri Baraka: Black Spirits: Festival of New Black Poets in America
Reissue with additional liner notes and archival material.
Gwendolyn Brooks: In the Mecca
Audio version of her book including the text from the book and new liner notes as well as archival material related to the text, which dealt with the gentrification of Chicago’s South Side. Jeremiah Jae, a Chicago based emcee from the Brainfeeder label, will perform the recitation.
Fred Moten: The Feel Trio
An album featuring Fred reciting the text from this book with musicians William Parker and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson.
Ai : Sin
An album featuring recitations of the poems from this now out-of-print text originally published in 1986, both refurbished from archives and newly rendered by poets and musicians. The text will be included with the liner notes.
Joseph Jarman : A Black Case Volume I & II : Return from Exile
An album featuring Jarman’s readings of poems from this now very rare and out-of-print text and musical accompaniment by members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago as well as a new edition of the text and well as liner notes by Art Ensemble member George Lewis.
A more detailed call by Harmony Holiday on the motives and modes for Mythscience can be read here: Poets Pressing Record(s).
