More about the Musical Collaboration

All the poems that I recorded with Belvedere Mountain Express are now up on Myspace (you can find them here - you will need to scroll down to find them all!). I thought this would be a good opportunity to say a bit about how we worked on the collaboration. When I joined Myspace, I noticed that Belvedere Mountain Express (an electronic musical project of Golebnik, who sometimes comments here) were 'looking for a female vocalist or poet'. I've often liked the idea of working with a musician. So I listened to Belvedere Mountain Express' music and we met up to discuss how we could work together. At that stage, I was thinking 'this is music I could really work with' but nothing more specific! I knew though, that I must be able to work with the track 'Aux Champs des Lapins' (In the Fields of the Rabbits), so I gathered together all my rabbit haiku and scattered them through the music. I also thought about the titles of the other tracks and tried to match them with existing poems of mine, to narrow down the poems I would try to fit in the music. From there it was a process of listening to the music over and over and fitting the words in. City Empire is an existing poem and I just fitted it to the track, whereas A Vow in the Blue Belltower was the existing title of the track and I edited a poem I was working on to fit it.

The greatest challenge was how to fit short poems into long musical tracks! We're both very pleased with how it all turned out, and judging from comments here and on Facebook, so are several other people! While you're visiting Belvedere Mountain Express on Myspace, do listen to their other music, they've got some excellent tracks!