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:
“As Allen, Barwin and Betts make their case for the continued joyous consumption of the irrational and revelatory, we hear the voices of their individual cultural inheritances as they strip the accretions of colonialism and approved culture from the ancient roots they suspect have been packaged for respectability and profit, and if we allow ourselves, participate in the audible presence of chant and chorus as they reverberate around the room we have chosen for consumption. [. . .] One can only hope they will continue to perform their boundary burning to reveal that all limits are actually invisible, that the rational and irrational, fantasy and reality, order and chaos, conscious and unconscious, rhythm and stasis, the approved and the shadow banned, are in fact, dance partners in the giddy whirl of life as they waltz and shimmy in disreputable indulgence.“ - Gordon Phinn, Periodicities
“The sound poems mirror the text but are not identical, although some of the poems from the book are in the sound poems, too. They play with linearity in the same way as the text in the book: incorporation of all kinds of elements: saxophone, xylophones, harmonies, grunts, rhythms, repetition, echoes, drums. [ . . .] Muttertongue is a call to openness, play and collaboration, a joyous experiment, and a reminder of what language can do when stretched and made elastic and springy. - Amanda Earl, The Temz Review
“Suffice it to say that readers with an interest in the performance/sound/visual tradition in poetry will find this book and album of great interest, showing, as it does, that the tradition is still very much alive and kicking. “ - Billy Mills, Elliptical Movements
“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
Album and collection featured in the New Books Network Podcast
SUPPORT POETRY: Don’t just listen to the album. Read the collection that it came from. Order Muttertongue in Hamilton here, or in Toronto here.