The Muttertongue Trio
Since 2017, Allen, Barwin and Betts have collaborated as The Muttertongue Trio exploring verbo-voco-visual poetry, investigating the intersection between sound, society, poetry and identity in dynamic performances both on stage and on the page.
Lillian Allen is the City of Toronto’s seventh poet Laureate, a dub poet, writer, Juno Award winner and a creative writing professor at OCAD University. A pre- and post-language innovator, she works at the intersection of dub, sound and rebel poetics. She publishes widely in print and audio, and lectures/performs internationally.
Gary Barwin is a writer, multimedia artist, performer, musician, and author of 32 books. His nationally bestselling novel, Yiddish for Pirates, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Giller Prize and won the Leacock Medal. His music, art, and writing have been performed, exhibited, published and broadcast internationally.
Gregory Betts is a poet and professor at Brock University and the author or editor of 25 books. His poems have been stenciled into the sidewalks of St. Catharines and selected by the SETI Institute to be implanted into the surface of the moon. He is an award-winning scholar of the Canadian avant-garde, curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive, and Literary Arts Residency Lead at the SETI Institute.
What the critics are saying:
“Muttertongue is the mother tongue, the muttering, and the uttering. It’s what comes before words; it’s the trace the words leave behind. It’s the poetry that’s outside of poetry, inside breath, simply breathing.” - Dawn MacDonald, The Seabord Review of Books
“It comes across that [the Muttertongue Trio] are “learning to talk to each other, across the slippage of language”. The LP is to be experienced as a whole rather than as distinct tracks to play, in order to piece them together and begin to make sense. Through this, we experience bass-heavy vocals that question the nature of language, with “mother sounds” connecting to the land. At other times, instead, we seem to be transported out of space, with futuristic, distorted sounds that feel somewhat alien.” - Carmina Masoliver, The Norwich Radical
“Woken and Unbroken (Remix)” featured in Radio Music Gallery 26 by Del Stephen
SUPPORT POETRY: Don’t just listen to the album. Read the collection that it came from. Preorder Muttertongue in Hamilton here, or in Toronto here.