Finally available fully on vinyl, here are the famous ‘Phonetic poems’ from Dadaist Raoul Hausmann – remastered from original tapes and for the first time with the correct track titles along with a 40 pages booklet including typescripts and texts. This LP is published on the occasion of the exhibition Raoul Hausmann and European Experimental Poetry (1945–1971). Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, château de Rochechouart.

The ‘Phonetic poems” were conceived in 1918, in the same period as the Russian futurist utterings of Khlebnikov and Iliazd – with the cosmic sorcerer and trans-rational language ‘Zaoum’ (1913), Hugo Ball at Cabaret Voltaire (Karawane, 1916), then Kurt Schwitters (Ursonate, 1922).

All these artists-poets were inventors (or re-discoverers) of a kind of ultra-language where primordial inter-ethnic and mythological sounds precede meanings, in order to redefine human communication and to connect to the multi-dimensional.

Foreshadows of sound poetry and performative action poetry, these ‘Phonetic Poems’ are still there, miraculously preserved thanks to some recordings made in 1955 by the house of Philips, then 1959 by Bureau and in 1966 by Henri Chopin, in Limoges where Hausmann had settled in 1944.

All tracks remastered and cut by Frederic Alstadt in 2019 at Ångström Mastering, Bruxelles. Graphic design : Jean-Baptiste Parre. Documentary Research : Chantal François-Texier. Text : Michel Giroud. Editors : Sébastien Faucon et Joachim Montessuis.

tracks:

1. SOUND-REL 04:16
2. bbbb + FMSBW 01:15
3. K’ perium 00:46
4. Poèmes sans titres + Oiseautal + Obada 02:38
5. Cauchemar 04:23
6. POEME S 01:00
7. Poèmes sans titres 03:45
8. OISEAUTAL 01:44
9. Conversation avec les lettristes 07:11
10. R.L.Q.S. poème en 3 cascades 23:56

VXX