Other Minds Records is pleased to announce de revolutionibus: sound homage to Copernicus, a new limited edition LP release from legendary text-sound poet Enzo Minarelli.
Minarelli compares the revolution of sound poetry to the revolution that Copernicus brought about with his discovery of the heliocentric nature of the solar system. Just like Copernicus put the sun at the center of the solar system, sound poets centered the human voice—and thus the sensuous nature of a text—over traditional systems of syntax.
Throughout de revolutionibus, the literal definitions of the words are stripped through repetition and minimalist processes, and layers of varying fidelity of the vocal recording obscure any intelligibility even further. Minarelli deftly combines his voice with found sound, synthesizer, and drum machine accompaniment, vacillating between something like noise assemblage and mutant hip hop.
de revolutionibus is at once a continuation and expansion of the vast corpus that the artist has built over his decades-long career. Elements of glitch music, pulsing drums, and grooving low frequencies are paired with more traditional elements of phonetic poetry creating an extraterrestrial hybrid, part avant-pop and part maximalist Dada treatise.
[O]n de revolutionibus, the veteran artist’s bubbling, ever-active audio art has a very particular weight. Minarelli’s gravelly emissions and the growling sound beds he creates with them feel like he’s digging around in sonic dirt, intent on finding poetic gold no matter how far down it’s buried. As he strings together his blurts, coughs, and exhalations, the fact that this album is a tribute to Copernicus starts to make sense—it’s as if Minarelli is probing the physical laws of words and sound to see how the two remain elusively connected. Marc Masters, Bandcamp, January 2022
1 · Sun Light (1:55)
2 · Earth Motion (2:19)
3 · Viriditas for Hildegard von Bingen (2:06)
4 · Tree Word (4:19)
5 · Almagesto-Tolomeo (3:20)
6 · Spherical Earth (2:58)
7 · Gravity (2:34)
8 · Wandering Planet (3:42)
9 · Ether Existence (2:00)
10 · Moon Menstruation 29 (3:59)
11 · Ecliptic (3:13)
12 · The Word Star (1:17)
13 · Spirit Motor for Kepler (4:03)
14 · CoperNicola (1:37)
