Languido
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Loosen your listening like a knot—tied, double-looped. Unfurl it and hear the layered sonic skin, the repetition. A line sneaks back around to feather your senses. Why is that? What is that? A half-dozen poets-sound-makers-performers-vocalizers comprise the Electroacoustical Poetical Society (EAPS). We call ourselves The Poets, sometimes The Electricians. Affectionate monikers defy genres and categories.  sketch by Phoebe Dingwall EAPS is the invention of American sound artist Marjorie Van Halteren. Since 2021, she’s gathered a corps of artists evolving to the current sextet. From her studio in France, she reaches the rest of us—in Italy, in the Eastern/Midwest/Western U.S. Twice a year our ears collectively tune to one word to guide or intrude our creative proclivities. Cobbled together, its broadcast compels further mystery. The edges of each artist’s work blur as all edges do in artistic radiophonics. Audio collectives abound. It seems we all want ears on our work, to marinate our ideas with others. Abstract artistry of any kind, reeling away from the representational narrative structures, oblige audiences to listen less distractedly. More so, we are a community of listening, says Gregory Whitehead of his engagement in EAPS—potentially tuning to one another like singers in vocal ensembles. Ilaria Boffa suggests of our entwining, “ … our distinct voices whirlwinding and then floating and merging and meandering, as water does during its journey towards the sea.”  from EAPS mixlr broadcast line-up The Word is Languid(o) E lucevan le stelle, e olezzava la terra, …Oh! Dolci baci, o languide carezze’ (Tosca, opera) We Poets recently tuned to the word languid and it morphed into musicality right from the start, the “o” brazenly affixed. As Tony Brewer describes, usually the writing comes slowly, brand new with the theme word as inspiration. But that’s not always the case. Languid has musical and also visual meaning. Brian Price sonically imagines the languishing images of women wrought by 19th-century painters. The synchronicity this time prevails in how we imagine the detritus of history spiraling into our present, whether it’s informed by resistance and inferno of war or the flotsam of an old family house. “When the pieces are banged together, a resonance is generated,” says Marjorie of her cohering the hour’s broadcast. How we work together is, again, uncanny. Half the year, we’re thinking about sound and vocals and leitmotif and story for whatever we happen to be engaged with. A word is tossed out: we catch it, let it hover and float until it lands.
Making with our own hands A prescient writer about The Machine, Paul Kingsnorth, arrives with a screed and generous public-offering. Imagery by his cohort ushers all creative engagement, whether you generate or consume; read, write, ensound; listen, compose, vocalize. Be a conscientious objector, he says; otherwise our offspring—or oddly-cobbled families—will miss out on those old battered paperbacks at the public library.
Kingsnorth recommends reveling in the limits. At the very least, we can plant a seed, he suggests, since isn’t that how we learned to love stories in the first place? This human-made artistry without gatekeepers is a hunger we don’t always know we need. Language and sound act as cue and plummet and propulsion. We are broadcasters of seeds and stories, poetics and electro~acousticality, neologisms of sounds floating the airwaves.  Logo by Justin Clark ~ LISTEN & READ ~ —Joan Schuman, Earlid curator, March 2026 |