The title seems to bear some kind of relationship to Raoul Hausmann's "Phonemes", although how or why it relates to Hausmann's actual piece is beyond me. For some reason it reminds me of horses too. Probably because it sounds like Houhonyms (if that's how you spell it), the horse kingdom beings from "Gulliver's Travels". Again, though, it's got as much to do with Swift as it has Hausmann .i.e. very little.

Random phrases from everyday life. Sort of thing everyone gets sick of hearing. Phrases repeated so regularly they lose their meaning. Not phonetic poetry then, but English language repeated so seemingly ad infinitum it has lost it's meaning already and has been reduced to pure sound.

Me, Martha Moopette and Erik Bumbledonk gathered around one mic to do this. I stood with the nutty percussion instrument I'd just got for Christmas. For some reason I couldn't figure out I felt like I was leading a Salvation Army chorus. Don't know why.

The music here comes from a few sources. Opening piano riff is a bar from a tune off an album I made called "PastelSketches", ran through a 12, 9, 4 number system of pitch-shifting. The line beneath the vocal parts is a couple of bars from "Fucking Rip-Off", which was my cheap imitation of John Cage's "Cheap Imitation" which was his cheap imitation of Satie's "Socrate" which is one of my very favourite tunes ever.

"Zip" is my mind-virus kabaret. Best seen live in a tiny venue. Gathered for this recording are the sound and phonetic poetry sections of the live performance, recorded with 'trademark' out-of-sync audience reaction. The original idea of Zip was to create minimalist comedy using the barest essentials of sound and language, phonetics and phrase repetition. To me this is the most pure of anything yet performed or recorded in the name of Zip, the most true to my original intentions.

This sort of stuff makes me laugh. It doesn't seem to make many other people laugh. It makes Erik Bumbledonk laugh, and he appears on this recording saying the word "Zip" over and over again at some points.

I dreamed "ARUCKATACKARUCKATACKAKVEEAAKVEEAA" one night. Woke up about 4am and wrote it on my bookshelf. The entire thing wrote and recorded itself.

The music makes me laugh. So does the sound of the words. I love chromatic descending scales and that plink-plonk style. It's my very favourite kind of music.

I first became interested in music-concrete when I made an Uutske Buutske recording called "Homoarachtus". Uutske Buutske is the name me and Andy Dickinson, aka The Travelling Mongoose, use when we work together. We've done a few albums (unreleased, naturally) and a single for TheThe. I went to York to stay at Andy's house with the intention of making "Vytrebenky" (an album a later did on my own). Andy had been getting into Stockhausen and was telling me about some of his ideas. We'd also both been into John Cage's thoughts for some time. So as usual we ploughed the furrow of what we were interested in. We were also both quite into a piece called "Liege a Paris" by Henri Pousseur, this wicked soundscape that keeps going into these Moogy synthy bits. We liked this idea of music-concrete going into more tuney conventional electronic music. The resulting recording ("Homoarachtus") is one of the things that I'm most proud of. Sonically, at least, nothing Andy or me have ever done comes anywhere close. Never been heard by anyone other than a few friends, though, many of whom agreed that the September 11 related content in it was a bit distressing for the while.

Regardless, it lead me to explore many more ideas using the techniques of found-sound with music-concrete. Cave is one such experiment. Well not really experiment because I pretty much knew what I was doing. Cave is one such track that uses those techniques.

The middle bit "ICTTTC" is a fantasy advert for my day job (I do freelance graphic and internet design, want to employ me?). I was doing a website for an ICT centre, and thought what better way to advertise it than with a brainfrying dissonant phonetic twenty second sound poem. They didn't want it, so I stuck it in Cave.

One of the reasons I love working with sound poetry is the sheer abstraction of it. The fact that a piece like Cave, or for that matter every other of my SFL BJCTS, inherently means absolutely nothing. It's a very emotional medium, liberated from words and their conventional use and understanding. Sound poetry is, for me, total artistic freedom. Which is pretty wicked really.

This is the longest cut of the first set of SFL BJCTS. The words were recorded at about 1am by me and my (incredibly tired) girlfriend/muse. But that's what made it sound good.

I have a jar full of words. I use it when I run out of ideas. I used to be a stand-up comedian. After two years of working the "circuit" in the North of England, I gave up, took out all the tapes of my performances, and transcribed every word of every routine and every improvisation I ever did. Closing a chapter in my art, basically, pretentious as that may sound. A couple of years later I took the manuscripts and cut every word, one-by-one, tearing the past to pieces. This became my jar of words.

The opening section of Gwelyhrsras is the first completed prose work created entirely using my word jar. Me and Katy (Martha Moopette) sat taking turns at the keyboard or the jar, picking out and reading randomly the chance words, whilst the other typed them. Sincere thanks to Tristan Tzara! The piece is overlaid twice over each other. And I like how it sounds.

Although, as I said earlier, the nature of sound poetry is that it means inherently nothing, I want to say this about Gwelyhrsras. All the way through it's genesis and it's recording I saw it as representing some kind of sexual power struggle.

The pair begin, bickering, arguing. Random words, meaninglessness, chaos. The typewriter, the words in written form, where they began. Or something like that. Then the calm. Yin and Yang begin to complement each other. Masculine and feminine work together to weave their meaningless meaning. And it all ends in piece, to the sound of a couple of melodicas and a scratchy old record.

Well that's just my interpretation. I hope you can find your own. Perhaps I shouldn't have said it in the first place.

More music-concrete. Bells, screwdrivers.

I see Gwelyhrsras as a space, a room.

For some reason I can't figure out it reminds me of the Hotel of Dramatic Follies scene in the mirror in Cocteau's "The Blood of a Poet". Don't know why. Maybe it's the violins are reminiscent of Auric for some reason to me. But it's more than that.

Katy's work as a painter, the way her lines are drawn and sense of composition, remind me very much of Cocteau. And Gwelyhrsras is very much a collaboration with Katy. So perhaps it's her input that gives it the Cocteau feel I get from it.

Or maybe there's no Cocteau feel and I'm imagining it.

Gwelyhrsras is a swirl that grows from the centre.

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