Luca de la Lune Reviews Your Devotee in Rags, a sonic poetry collaboration by Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman

Review: Your Devotee in Rags, a sonic poetry collaboration by Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman

Review by Luca de la Lune

Your Devotee in Rags truly is a voracious visage of passionate construction. Exotic soundstages tumble unfettered around thunderous drum breaks and wholly convincing vocal performances. The narrative is female - is woman. Churning laments championed by steaming percussion drive us through moments, memories, patriarchy. The narrator is hungry. The voice is visceral, snarling.

Your Devotee in Rags takes place in a brutalist landscape, bloody and hard-fought—yet through the eyes of our narrator, there is hope and a cathartic solace. My favourite track on the record occurs halfway through: 'to never have enough, be enough, get enough' rolls repeatedly from a cursive maw, comforting you in how casually it makes you feel seen. Hypnotically coherent it lands a dagger and twists it with persistence. 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 would be totally unique. immeasurably useful and changing; thus, I would recommend this album to anyone.

Your Devotee in Rags from Sonic Recordings, 2024.

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More about Your Devotee in Rags:

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.  

More about Anne Waldman:

Anne Waldman is a living legend. Poet, performer, professor, editor, cultural activist, grandmother, and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Former director of the Poetry Project. Tireless author of over 40 books, her trademark energy coils ever outward, always seeking to reveal the four-fold vision that we have largely lost.

More about Andrew Whiteman:

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. 

Siren Recordings is a digital, multimodal platform that operates as boutique, studio, and archive. We seek to connect scholars, artists, and lovers of sonic poetry in an online community. Following Ed Sanders, we believe that perfection comes in the poetic triad: “the spoken text/the text as beauteously presented on the page/the text as performed.” We incorporate elements of sound and music into recordings of poetry performances to emphasize the affective, social experience of poetic work.  

We value experimentation in form, both contemporary and modern. We renew older poetic works by treating the archive as a participant in the work we are making; archival play ensures that our releases blend contemporary technology with influential poetry. These values seek to serve one, ultimate goal: to contribute to the siren call that warns of the diminishing time we spend in the archaic situation of gathering to hear someone speak.

Power Q & A with Andrew Whiteman

Close your eyes and open your ears, friends, ‘cause cultural icons, Anne Waldman (The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment) and Andrew Whiteman (Broken Social Scene) have collaborated to create Your Devotee in Rags—a metamorphic sonic poetry LP being released with Siren Recordings.

Your Devotee in Rags is a missive to this age of patriarchal power, its songs and poems are designed to specifically confront that power and hold it to account. Taking such activist inspiration from musicians like Lido Pimienta and Tanya Tagaaq, musically Your Devotee in Rags blends acoustic and electronic genres, waltzes, laments, and Pauls Boutique-era Beastie Boys mash-ups all with the intent of creating a new artistic headspace: sonic poetry. The cultural direction is forward, the earbuds open up the stereo field, listening to Your Devotee in Rags is, in a word, empowering. 

We are excited to have Andrew join us today to talk to us about poetry as resistance. Welcome, Andrew!

Q: How is the performance of poetry an act of resistance, and what kind of resistance can listeners of Your Devotee in Rags expect to experience?

A: In the global west, the reading of poetry is already culturally resistant: its values are contrary to those promulgated by the culture-at-large. It seeks sustained and total attention, it slows the world around you down to a movement of breath, it rejects merely instrumental language and instead offers soul-making as the ‘pay-off’. Poetry doesn’t explain, it makes; but what it makes isn’t valued by society. To decide to spend one’s time here is to resist everything else the culture throws at you. Anne Waldman’s long career of poetry and performance teaches us that the human body is an integral part of this pact. The sounding of poetry keeps us grounded to the physical dimensions of our psychic being, even as it splits off like a kite into the blue or a truffle pig snout to the dirt. Isn’t that an antidote to virtuality, as it is now envisioned? Sonic Poetry treats the earbuds as the entry point for an experience of physicalized thought—in this case, Anne’s Your Devotee in Rags. Here, Waldman launches mind form after mind form at the patriarchy’s cynicism and embedded cruelty, buoyed and urged onward by an acoustic/electric collage by turns terrifying and tender. Like life.

Andrew Whiteman

More about Your Devotee in Rags:

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.” 

More about Anne Waldman:

Anne Waldman is a living legend. Poet, performer, professor, editor, cultural activist, grandmother, and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Former director of the Poetry Project. Tireless author of over 40 books, her trademark energy coils ever outward, always seeking to reveal the four-fold vision that we have largely lost.

More about Andrew Whiteman:

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. 

Siren Recordings is a digital, multimodal platform that operates as boutique, studio, and archive. We seek to connect scholars, artists, and lovers of sonic poetry in an online community. Following Ed Sanders, we believe that perfection comes in the poetic triad: “the spoken text/the text as beauteously presented on the page/the text as performed.” We incorporate elements of sound and music into recordings of poetry performances to emphasize the affective, social experience of poetic work.  

We value experimentation in form, both contemporary and modern. We renew older poetic works by treating the archive as a participant in the work we are making; archival play ensures that our releases blend contemporary technology with influential poetry. These values seek to serve one, ultimate goal: to contribute to the siren call that warns of the diminishing time we spend in the archaic situation of gathering to hear someone speak.

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