Anne WAldman
Andrew Whiteman is a musician and mythopoetics scholar from Montreal, Canada. He writes and performs in Broken Social Scene, Apostle of Hustle, AroarA, and Poets’ Workout Sound System. He is a co-founder of Siren Recordings.
Your Devotee in Rags is a sonic poetry collaboration between Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman; an act of desire and metamorphosis expanding the performative vision of being at the horizon of new experience, stripped down, exploring the turf, through poetry and spiritual yearning.
Anne says: “Wizard Hal Willner would be proud of us companions in the vibrational matrix. Comrades in a studio of subtle suspense, and where were we headed? A magnificent voyage! Tender, rugged, true. I met Andrew Whiteman genius player, composer, scholar in one of Hal’s unpredictable alchemical laboratories. We instantly bonded as mavens of poetry and its attendant orality, dedicated to the passion of epic life that is the source of this album, the 1000 plus pages of the feminist canto: Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment; passages plucked to be re-imagined in ambient explosive word-sound. On the Yantzse, in a strip club, a maelstrom of memory honoring precursor male poets, dressed in the rags of Celtic hags, so much more as mendicant, witty siren, compassionate lover, exploding empires of patriarchy and war. A kind of mythic hospitality.”
Andrew says: “It was filmmaker Ron Mann and producer Hal Wilner who showed me the way. Hal was my guiding presence - whip smart, funny, gentle, empathic. This album is dedicated to him.”
SUPPORT POETRY: Don’t just listen to the album. Read the collection that it came from. Buy Anne’s Iovis Trilogy here.
Praise for Your Devotee in Rags:
“When Anne Waldman opens Your Devotee in Rags with the words “I ebb like the ocean” (on the track Hag of Beare), the legendary poet could well be describing the album itself, whose melodies and rhythms undulate keenly to entice the listener into its markedly dark soundscape, where we sit in intrigue through this compelling experiment in sonic poetry.
Waldman’s powerful wordsmithing is intuitively backed with diverse musical musings furnished by Andrew Whiteman of Broken Social Scene. Whiteman’s rolling percussion marches the eclectic music forward, thrusting Waldman’s bravely voiced poetry into the fore. Altogether, the album could be described as something of an artful manifesto, critiquing injustices across lands and ages, through to the present moment and place.” (Khodi Dill, The Grey Griot)
“As an album it is symbiotic. The sawtooth synthesizers bite in tandem with our protagonists’ chomping barbs. A familiar, telephone-like distortion frequently warms vocals and instruments alike. Drones and Sirens haunt from both ends of the frequency spectrum. It is a complete experience. A mature sense of structure skillfully coddles the raw chaos.
I predict the journey it takes each listener on will be totally unique, immeasurably useful and changing; thus, I would recommend this album to anyone.” (Luca de la Lune)