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'Bandsalat' for Mirror Lamp Press at The Complex

Such a pleasure to take part in the first live event organised by Mirror Lamp Press last Friday evening at The Complex Arts Centre in north inner city Dublin, where I performed a set constructed around my poem 'Bandsalat (Verse Chorus Verse)' - a poem specially commissioned for the journal's inaugural issue in April 2021.

Mirror Lamp Press is an online journal exploring the intersection of art and literature. Edited by Gwen Burlington and Eoghan McIntyre, it has already amassed an impressive list of contributors across artforms. As well as celebrating publication of its eighth issue which went live earlier that day, the event sought to showcase writing from previous issues and presented screenings of four commissioned audiovisual essays.

My poem 'Bandsalat (Verse Chorus Verse)' was composed in response to the editors' brief of writing on an object of my choice that brought some kind of relief or happiness during a time of prolonged home confinement and forced social withdrawal in early 2021. The object I selected was my long-suffering cassette tape copy of the Nirvana album Nevermind, which I bought in 1991 very shortly after its release. The term Bandsalat literally translates as 'tape salad', and refers to the (far too frequent) occurrence of cassette tape getting tangled up or being chewed in the playback machine and becoming damaged or even unlistenable. 'Verse Chorus Verse' is an unreleased live album by Nirvana, originally scheduled for November 1994 but cancelled following the death of Kurt Cobain earlier that year. There's also a Nirvana track with that title - which is itself a sarcastic acknowledgement of the standard rock song format. To construct my poem I extracted fragments of text from early reviews of Nevermind as well as from critical writing on the history, culture and mechanics of the cassette tape, and remixed them by jamming them arbitrarily into each other.

For last Friday's performance I selected three poems from my recent book Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document with links to the above in terms of writing methodology, references and subject, and delivered them along with the full text of 'Bandsalat (Verse Chorus Verse)' while moving with my mic & its stand very close to, then around and behind the audience before returning to the stage area. Additional unevenness in audibility and proximity to the material was incorporated into the performance by spontaneously reading parts of the poems off-mic.



A pleasure also to witness haunting and irreverent performances by Suzanne Walsh and Isadora Epstein with Stéphane Hanly respectively, and to watch the films by Beth Fox, Michelle Doyle, Moran Been-noon and Colm Keady-Tabbal.

Thanks to Gwen and Eoghan for the invitation to perform 'Bandsalat', and to the full house at The Complex for their attention to my work.


event photos & footage by Gwen Burlington

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