szájzene (phonopoetica)

newly vinyl-reissued on Soundohm


release rationale


"Katalin Ladik "Phonopoetics" LP


The avant-garde has always been a realm of blurry lines - of practices which traverse medium, discipline, and the boundaries of everyday life, refusing to be nailed down and easily defined. A near perfect capsule of this remarkable spirit - once stretching to every corner of the globe, is captured by the latest addition to Alga Marghen’s ever expanding catalog of crucial documents from the history of sound art and sound poetry - Katalin Ladik’s Phonopoetics, the first ever survey, issued in limited edition of 300 copies, of this seminal Hungarian artist’s sonic efforts.

A thing of beauty, drawing from the period between 1968 and 1993, its two stunning sides shatter the lines between performance, the spoken word, fine art, and experimental music, offering the terms to rethink how each is understood.

Born in 1942, Katalin Ladik has lived a wild and multifaceted creative life - beginning primarily as a poet of the written word, expanding into experimental theatre during the mid 1970s, and ultimately becoming an artist whose practice also incorporates sound and visual poetry, performance art, experimental music, audio plays, happenings, mail art, collage, and photography, built around visual and vocal expression, as well as movement and gesture. Phonopoetics, Alga Marghen’s remarkably diverse survey of Ladik’s audio work, is a refracting lens into this dense and dynamic world - a totem which belongs to a sprawling puzzle of highly nuanced personal, social, political, and existential themes, springing from the feminist and gender neutral concerns of Eastern Europe during the 1960s and 70s.

The totality of Ladik’s practice, particularly as it unfolds across the two sides of Phonopoetics, can be understood as a radical rethinking of the potential, manifestation, and application of poetry, as well as the fundamentals of vocalization. Delving toward the very origins of consciously created sound - spoken or otherwise, her efforts unseat the divisions placed between literary, musical, theatrical and visual disciplines, joining them throug the fundamental need and right to express. With the excepting of two works, Shaman Song / Sámánének (1968), and Ufo-Nopoetica (1976-1993), the featured body of work was created between 1974 and 1979, a prolific period which also witnessed her working within the Novi Sad Theatre and Radio Novi Sad. A rising sea tones, utterances, and expressions, eluding to an unseen body in space, these discrete efforts range from the unquestionably musical - her voice a single element within a landscape of diverse texture and tone, flirtations with folk melody, to solo explorations of the root meanings of vocal sound - primal and poetic, with shamanic overtones and therapeutic mechanisms of liberation, capturing the image of an almost entirely unheard history within the field of feminist expression developed by pioneering figures like Monique Darge and Joan La Barbara.

In the words of Henri Chopin, the great visionary of sound poetry, when speaking about her in 1979, Ladik is "a great, magical voice.. ”. A true revelation, breaking through the shadows of time, Alga Marghen’s issue of Phonopoetics places this little heard, and profoundly important artist into the centre of our consciousness where she will no doubt remain. Brilliant, beautiful, challenging, and historically seminal. Highly recommended on every count. A vital entry in the field of sound art, historic Eastern European experimental practice and sound poetry.

This tiny edition of 300 won’t sit around for long. Grab it fast."


Sound Cage - a portrait of Katalin Ladik from igorbuharov on Vimeo.