Timelines are rubbish. But, when one hasn’t the words for something mysterious, perhaps formulas come into their own.

Monday March 26th 2018 : In Dublin, for the Phonica event series, musicians and poets performing together. DD plays. I have no context for the technique talent of being a violionist or whatever, but she’s using (bad) old poetry alongside singing. She’s no wearing any shoes. I do a thing which people seem to see, I eat an apple etc… and afterward meet her. How striking are collaborations with other humans when they don’t do what you do and can confound what you do and realise your own suspicions about your work being pointless and sad and an endless arrangement of jumbled words very very few people care to read.

March to August, spring to summer 2018: DD and I begin a correspondence. She sends me an audio recording of her setting one of my existent poems, The Tradition, as a song. New poems are sent back, buried after sending. I don’t read them once. They seem to land somewhere. I keep getting audio files back. Words I marked down are resurrected, edited, interpreted, better than before, like a dead pet returned to life. The Poems are about animals as lighted pathways, dreams of dark rivers that couldn’t be real and what can be picked up and what is too heavy to be picked up, I think.

She says, addressing me as well as you, “When I read the work i had a corporeal reaction to text that was new. I experience the text as text + a physical presence behind the text at the same time. I think because you are unusually space aware and body grounded for a writer. That was so unusual and so i responded.  Most of the time when i read your words I hear them in another voice, except some lines, I hear them in my own voice, or both at the same time. Those lines I mine, save them for later. When I've collected enough i grab my violin and find a few chords, and then try the lines out. The first song, touch, i sent a really loose version to you and you sent me back a new version of the text to better fit the song. i think that moment jumpstarted the process, even though it never happened again that way.”

August to September, summer to autumn 2018 : DD is putting together a tour, a solo one woman show, which knits music written for her by Garth Knox with Dutch creation myths and a massive wooden lungbox that is her violin and how she plays it. She includes some of The Poems.

October 13th 2018 : DD and I meet for a second time and collaborate for European Poetry Festival at Rich Mix, London. The digital curtain is drawn back and will the exchange of poems into songs be able to keep its jelly walls intact? It seems not. The performance has nothing to do with The Exchange. It’s about weapons, fruit, proximity, touch and induced social awkwardness.

November 29th 2018 : I travel to Amsterdam for one night to witness the start of DD’s Violin Spaces tour at Bimhuis. It is clearly a marked moment in her career. The venue is nice, set over water, huge letters denoting itself. It’s a blackbox jazzclub. DD is clearly famed in Holland and Europe. Her separation of herself from her skill with the violin is admirable, but she still has that skill and that separates us, forever, profitably. I discover my visual poems, specifically my Scribbling and Scrawlings, which DD had formerly obtusely requested, are now projected onto the stage and over her face for significant portions of the show. This is the most graceful and considerate use of my visual works ever. The show itself is mesmerising. I’m quite wordless. But write some new Poems things during it. Three or four times during the show, the opening, near the closing, in its heart, are The Poems. The resurrection of the dead pet has now become a human, or pet, the dead poet pet, the collective platonic resurrection. I did once write these words, likely in my pants, sat on my bed, a long time past, in a tiny corner, but I might’ve well as not have. But here they are sung back to me. Phase two of The Poems happens.

March 2019 : DD visits London to teach at the Royal Academy of Music and we might for the fourth time, maybe the last. We have an afternoon discussing how new Poems are needed to become new Songs and I take DD to William Blake’s grave, though I have no particular affection for his work. Phase three of The Poems happens.

April 2019 : DD plays her show all over, I think, but also on a tour of Indonesia. I receive pictures of her playing with my Scribbles as a mask. But it could’ve happened anywhere. The Poems as Songs continue to bear prickly fruit. She says (actually), “i played a version of the Spaces show at Rewire festival in march. the projections were really cool there because the back curtain had an extra layer of black gauze in front of it, so the scribbles looked kind of 3D.”

June 2019 : The Modern Genetics “triple LP by laberge, laberge dramm and dramm” is released. The Poem as Song Touch is featured on 180-gram vinyl from Splender Records.

July 2019 : DD premieres another new solo show using The Poems at Mittelfest in Italy, Wonderfeel Festival and Gaudeamus Festival in Hollandland. She is presenting a new solo violin show, this time accompanying herself with her feet, using drums and an organ pedal, apparently. I never see the show. Not only The Poems feature, but, so I hear, digitally, she recites from memory from an unpublished book of mine, titled, as of writing, The Great Apes. She has asked previously to read what I’m working on. The Poems are from a bit about a killer Chimp.

She says, “I had a dress and a decor made for this show and as it was all coming together I realized that I was actually making a mini opera, and that besides the classical violin pieces and the songs I needed another layer to wind its way through, a third element to connect these two worlds together, both sonically and emotionally, and also like commentary, but like commentary from the inside. I appropriated the parts of Chimp that felt like they filled in that gap for me."

September 2019 : This hasn’t happened yet but The Poems as Songs will be released on a CD with seven tracks, called Beastings. The EP will be accompanied by a pamphlet which has the original The Poems before DD made them better by cutting them up into smaller, newer chunks and singing them. Perhaps there we will meet for the fifth time.

Beastings released - November 2019

The EP Beastings is out on Pretty Purgatory Records. To order limited edition CD & Chapbook or cassette and also on Spotify and wherever else music streams. Go here please, have a listen https://prettypurgatory.bandcamp.com/album/beastings

The CD comes with accompanying 29-page poetry chapbook featuring lyrics and expanded poems by SJ Fowler, published by Sampson Low LTD (London, England since 1793). A mention below from the All Around Sound website -

"Amazon", the second single from Dramm's forthcoming album Beastings, immediately hooked me with is juxtaposition of opposites - Dramm's vocals are light and airy against at first an effect not unlike a sliding trombone, and then a mounting cacophony of Dramm caresses Fowler's texts holding them firmly aloft above them to set the mood but also to leap out among the fray of otherworldly sounds Dramm is somehow able to weave from her violin. Fowler's texts are elusive, weaving paths of serpentine grace as Dramm's accompaniment blooms forth, both occasionally dealing glancing blows at they intersect at just the right moments. "To be inside a background noise of a thing I don't possess" Dramm sings, accented by a rumbling low end. / "Amazon" is an excellent piece of songcraft - multitudinous in sound and meaning, a luxurious unfurling reverie that's both delightful simple and awe-inspiringly complex. It's a testament to Dramm's compositional prowess that she's able to craft such a lush backdrop of infinitely rewarding instrumental flourishes that doesn't distract from the simplistic but elusive beauty of Fowler's text.

The booklet is available from publishers Sampson Low

https://sampsonlow.co/2019/12/29/beastings-sj-fowler/

Launching Beastings in Amsterdam December 18, 2019

i had a chance to see the Beastings album made by diamanda dramm of my poems, written for the purpose, launched in splendor in amsterdam this past dec 14th. i didn’t perform, but sat in the circle of musicians, led by diamanda, who played out the first half of the night, before there was a listening to the album, in darkness, for the second half.

as in 2018, the experience in holland, with my poems taken so seriously through diamanda’s playing and making of them was unusual for me. i had a chance to be on VPRO radio talking about them, not quite knowing what to say they were and realising how rare it is to be asked questions about my poems by people who have heard them. i had the chance to meet lots of new musicians too, alongside poets like chris cusack and nadia de vries and it was right what diamanda has made in this album was celebrated

A poem as a song on the Dramm's Modern Genetics June 22, 2019

Been a grand source of collaborative verve to work with Diamanda Dramm over the last 15 months or so (we’ve more significant outputs to release into the aetherworld this year that I am particularly proud of) and recently a poem of mine which was written to become a song of hers was featured on a remarkably beautiful “triple LP by laberge, laberge dramm and dramm.”, that is Diamanda and her creators. The LP is made up of live recordings & unreleased material on 180-gram vinyl, plus a high-quality digital download code. the first release on Splendor Records. I’m lucky to be a small part of a special sonic object

Modern Genetics can be ordered through Bandcamp online here

David Dramm plays guitars and sings. Anne La Berge play flutes and electronics, talks, and sings. Diamanda La Berge Dramm plays the violin, bass pedals, kick drum and sings.

From the makers - “a collector’s item upon release, this triple LP is a musical family history unlike any other. a rousing mix of punk, country, spoken word and electro. recorded live in Splendor Amsterdam by the 21st von Trapp family La Berge Dramm & guests.” Modern Genetics was recorded during live concerts at Splendor Amsterdam, in various studios in New York City and Amsterdam, in a hall in Eindhoven, and at home between 1990 and 2018. https://diamandadramm.com/modern-genetics/

Subverse by Diamanda Dramm features my poems July 27, 2019

A new solo show by Diamanda Dramm continues her and I’s collaboration, as this time, at Mittelfest (IT), Wonderfeel Festival (NL), and Gaudeamus Festival (NL), she is presenting “an unrelenting solo violin set extending into the bass realm: Diamanda accompanies herself with her feet, using drums and organ pedal, uniting her whole physique into sound. She unfolds the sound of her violin, navigating its peripheries and pushing them out a little bit. The set designed uniquely for this program connects the sonic experience to its visual manifestation.” with music by Dramm, La Berge Dramm, Bach, Corelli. Purcell, Biber. and text by me. The text is taken from a new unpublished work, a book length work about CHIMPS. Diamanda recites it from her mind in between the proper music. This is strange and magical for those words. https://diamandadramm.com/news/

Dramm violioning before my Scribbles in Indonesia April 29, 2019

My ongoing collaboration with the musician performer violionist Diamanda Dramm continues to bear prickly fruit. Recently Diamanda played at the Rewire festival and in Indonesia and utilised some of my Scribblings (poems taken from my Poem Brut book The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling published in 2018 by Tom Jenks’ Zimzalla press) as projected walls of backdrop in front on which she violioned, singing some of my hard words too, in the midst of sense. No larger compliment could be paid to my penning. https://zimzalla.co.uk/051-sj-fowler-selected-scribbling-and-scrawling/

Collaborating with Diamanda Dramm Oct 21, 2018

Diamanda’s bio note often mentioned she has played with a violin since she was 4. Intimidating (if you are a musicians). For many months we’ve corresponded and I’ve ended up writing new poems that Diamanda has set to her magic music, editing the words and creating the sounds. / We collaborated for the European Poetry Festival Camarade, in front of 200 people, and she was generous enough to move over from her world renowned music talents, bringing them with her, but stepping hard below, to monkey with folk. She was great at that too, we hoodwinked.