There's something old-fashioned -- I dare say impure -- about a musician and a poet creating a set of crystalline miniatures, both in scale and in inception, hearkening back to an earlier time when it was only natural for disciplines to be truly crossed.

Kenneth Goldsmith UbuWeb

Abaton Book Company is pleased to announce the release of A Voice Hears You from Mysterious Places, a collaboration between singer/songwriter/composer Marianne Nowottny and noted poet and art critic Barry Schwabsky. This CD presents a selection of tightly focused vignettes of textual and musical clarity. Marianne Nowottny has created a melodic armature of voice, lo-fi keyboards, damaged electronics and percussion that organically intertwines through and around Barry Schwabsky’s spare yet pointed versification.

Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation. His essays have appeared in many publications and his books include The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art, Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting and several volumes of poetry, the most recent being A Book Left Open in the Rain (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail). He has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, New York University, Goldsmiths College (University of London) and Yale University.

Marianne Nowottny has released numerous CDs over the past fourteen years, including Skymother Mountain: a selection of poems by Li Bái and Divine Cantos: based on Dante’s Divina Commedia. Recently, she provided the soundtrack to Provocative Dramas by Arch Oboler, a CD featuring two plays by one of oldtime radio’s most entertaining and influential writers.

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Download a 300.dpi photograph of Marianne Nowottny & Barry Schwabsky.

Please credit as: Photo courtesy Mathias Augustyniak and Abaton Book Company

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