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CD
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BLUE 017CD
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"Souls of the Labadie Tract is the second collaboration between musician David Grubbs and poet Susan Howe. Susan Howe's and David Grubbs' collaboration is largely without precedent. (Cage and Tudor? Robert Creeley and Steve Lacy?) Souls of the Labadie Tract takes as its starting point a substantial new poem by Howe that will appear in a collection bearing the same title, to be published in 2007 by New Directions. The Labadists were a Utopian Quietest sect that moved from the Netherlands to Cecil County, Maryland in 1684. The community dissolved in 1722. All that was to remain of it was the 'labadie poplar.' Thiefth, beginning with its title, is a glittering assemblage of shards. By contrast, Souls of the Labadie Tract sustains a sound world of buzzing reeds and electronics. After a prose introduction, individual poems occur as regularly as grave markers. Howe's reading is a marvel of hushed intensity. Grubbs' chosen instruments for this piece include two species of khaen, Laotian free-reed mouth organs that at signal moments fluoresce into a full ensemble. A distant VCS3 synthesizer slowly moves to the foreground with what becomes a full-circuited roar."
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