Echoes And Edges - Open Collab #6
The talented duo Charlie ‘Angel’ and Jake ‘The Magician’ – dubbed by me! – get together every month to grace us with their varied musical talents, presenting live improvised collaborations between music played by them and poetry written and narrated by their devout poetic followers.
Dance with me. That was the first thought that came to mind when the music went into full swing and the truly poetic words came flowing through the wind. It has been a completely mesmerising night, and I came away thinking ‘what an excellent idea, and my what talent in improvisation!’
‘Charlie + Jake’ come on screen live through Youtube and I find myself sitting intently to hear what’s going to happen tonight. You see, all I knew prior to this moment was that I was invited to the Echoes and Edges event for their 6th ever collab and they were spreading the word:
‘Echoes and Edges Open Collab is an immersive evening of improvised music set to spoken word. The night will be totally spontaneous and totally magic. We listen to your poems once during the day to get a flavour of what to expect, but leave the creation of the sonic world to be improvised on the spot with any instruments we feel like picking up!’
This came to me as a combination of intrigue and excitement. Who doesn’t love poetry, the romanticism in every word bouncing off your tongue, setting a scene, playing to a rhythm, telling a story? And who doesn’t love music, the instrumentals making your body want to bop and sway? It is a marriage made in heaven and I wasn’t going to miss out!
Charlie, I dubbed as ‘angel’ (did anyone make the Charlie’s Angel connection? I will just put this here for you to ponder on) as the moment she released her first breath in angelic notes I became hooked. You see her intently sitting in the studio surrounded by instruments, concentration to max [volume] – excuse the pun! – every move she makes is purposeful and measured, yet with an essence of free flow and spontaneity. She cleverly picks out parts of the poem which she sings on repeat, and her angelic voice reverberates; now I know why the duo are called Echoes and Edges!
Jake, whom I dubbed ‘the magician’ has a quiet intelligence to him, he is down to earth and soft spoken, and every instrument he places into his magical hands surrounding him in the studio becomes his magical wand, a device releasing a rhapsody of pleasures and delights.
Charlie + Jake are a magnificent duo both with their own special talents and together they compliment each other to make Echoes and Edges a true pleasure to watch and listen to as your senses are transported on an evening of poetry and musical improvisation. What’s more they ‘give’ so much to others as they make so many people happy, proud and excited to see their poetry being presented live out there for the masses to see.
The Programme and Artists
The open collab is a 2 and half hour online event so make sure if you join us in the future, you get yourself comfortable, with plenty of soft pillows as you are in for a long night. Although that’s certainly not an issue if you just put on your dancing shoes and make it a stay-in dance night for you and a friend or two. So get your jazz hands out and your disco balls at the ready ‘cause you’re in for a treat!
The theme for this session was ‘Milestones’, possibly reaching a milestone in your life, or reminiscing on a milestone you achieved and are proud of. Charlie mentions ‘we didn’t expect this project to take off like it has’ which shows that this dynamic duo certainly reached a milestone as they celebrate their 6-month anniversary of success.
The first poet, Steve Head, starts off the evening with a bang, narrating his poem ‘Summer in Springtime’, a poet and novelist from the leafy suburbs of London who has moved to Paris. It is a romantic nostalgia of his time in Paris in 2013 where he met his wife by chance while on a road trip which led them to making numerous trips across the Channel to see each other, and gradually get to know each other until they slowly fell in love. He expresses his ‘heady and hallucinatory’ sensations of falling in love. The music improvisation accompanying this piece felt quite calm and meditative easing you into the melody, giving you that essence of springtime flowers and new-found love blooming, birds chirping and wind blowing making you imagine the spring. With the mention of the ‘church on the hilltop’ in the poem, Steve Head, is highly descriptive giving you vivid imagery. As Charlie states with a smile ‘we wanted to start the evening with some love and some positivity’ and you could certainly feel that.
Next on the programme is Max Avon, a performance poet and musician from the beautiful Bath with his poem ‘Against the World’. He is the President of the ‘Bath Spa University, Spoken Word and Performance Poetry Society’. He wrote this poem in early 2019 on a long journey back from Manchester after watching a group of friends perform their final gig together. He was very emotional and scared that he would lose these friends as they lived across the country and were moving on to new stages – milestones – of their lives. Fittingly, this piece is a reflection of why the things we love in life must eventually come to an end in order for us to develop. There is an essence of acceptance here, as the poem is read in a calm and tranquil tone resembling thought and contemplation. The melody is played in blues-y tones embracing the serenity of the poetry, gentle and still, yet you find yourself swaying to the music. ‘Weaving your lyrics into the fabrics of the sky’, were words from the poem that really stood out to me, giving a just metaphor for music and how it travels on sounds waves.
Charlie and Jake choreograph around the studio playing musical chairs and are careful not to become entangled in the wires of the plethora of musical instruments in their quaint little studio, as we move onto the next poem by Amanda Miller from Connecticut, USA. ‘Venus Half Moon’ is a two-part poem written from the point of view of an omniscient narrator that sees the relationship between two beings - whether human or other-worldly. The foundation of the poem is about a character that is dealing with unrequited love, it is riddled with complexity as the character deals with a presence that both is intrusive yet invisible; the main character cries about this being that exists in her mind and that she has not truly met. The accompanying music is out-of-this-world; it is atmospheric music with mystical undertones, almost pagan in essence. It starts with remote footsteps that felt like walking on the moon! As Jake explains ‘we like to create atmos(phere) which helps position the poems and we add sounds which are from all over the world, sounds which we have recorded ourselves just being out and about or on trips away, walks around Bristol. This is me walking around the Australian bush off the South East Coast in Victoria, a remote island’.
As we move on, Charlie explains how the team found some reoccurring themes and so we follow on to two poems combined into one musical expression. The first, ‘Each Day She Wakes Him’ narrated by Luke Addison, a 27 year old drama teacher from Woking, is inspired by a number of people he met whilst caring, focusing mainly on the wife of a man who now has dementia. Often the partners of those with great challenges are overlooked as the focus of attention is always on them. The second, ‘The Longest Goodbye’, is by Aby Hayes from the east coast of Scotland. She spends her time at the beach or hiding in her favourite coffee shop, where words tumble out of her in verse - so poetry is her preferred writing form, although there is a short story or two scribbled in her notebook as well. It is a story of a final milestone and the realisation that when it comes to the emotions and the connections between us and within us, that nothing is final. The music starts off in a dream-world, a psychedelic tune, a little twinkle on the keyboard adding a start-light, star-bright feel to the tune.
Rohan Samuel from London wrote and narrated the poem ‘Seasonal Change’. He is a spoken word artist who is new to the scene and uses poetry to inspire people, to create a domino effect of positivity and make a change in society one word at a time. He expresses the emotion of depression that was hidden by anger when he was younger, speaking of the transition of his emotions and how each of the stages link with the weather. He uses different ‘weathers’ in the word-play of this piece. The music starts off with funky beats on the guitar and the piano, giving a jazzy tune that lingers, and the clapping of hands adds a beat to the music. Rohan’s wording sounding like rapping in a rhythm and blues tune. My favourite verses ‘tidal waves of emotions surge through my body’, ‘volcanic eruptions erupting inside of me’ , ‘not every thunder storm comes with lighting’, and ‘when tectonic plates of emotion collide together’ show how true his words are in describing his emotions using atmospheric phenomena. You find Rohan popping in words like ‘foggy’, ‘hazed’, ‘ice’ and ‘tide’ to symbolise his anger and depression in the form of weather effects. He says ‘let positivity be your umbrella to weather you from the storm’ – he shows that you can shelter yourself from negative emotions by building a positive outlook in life, where when ‘you learn to smile, people will understand what true sunshine is’. Charlie sings this final hopeful verse on repeat, clapping and bopping away to bring an upbeat end to the song.
Next, ‘The Mist on the Mountain’ is a poem narrated by Mark De’Lisser, a poet and artist, a father and an earthling! He writes to express and to connect, and in doing so he has found healing. The poem is about how we are intimately connected to mother earth and with her rhythms and is a reflection of how remembering and re-establishing this bond helped him to heal his weary soul. The atmosphere starts with sea-waves, a whooshing sound, recorded at Lyme Regis on the south coast of England, in Dorset. These sounds are set in combination with gale-force winds reverberating around a massive stone lighthouse from an island just off Australia. The sparkle in the tune reminds of a misty day. Mark starts with ‘dragons breath, the ghost of a warrior who laid down his weapon on his final breath’ as if to speak of the epic journey of a character from a fantasy fiction story or from the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table. The music collides with the words in a majestic tune as he continues with ‘I stood in the footsteps of the Old Gods and thrown myself at the shrines of the new’ continuing the epic story that comes only from myths and legends. The music is calming, restful, and mellow, a cross between a pagan ritual and an ode to the queen of nature from a fantasy book, and truly is inspired by an essence of healing.
Blackswan n Robin narrate ‘Milestones’ next – they are a creative collaboration from London and Devon, and since lockdown have written about hope and clarity, disruption and distraction. Contrasts between the dichotomies of rural and urban, male and female, black and white, run through their works. At this greatly unpredictable and unknown time during a pandemic crisis, reaching and marking milestones are especially odd and challenging. Layers of anxiety, regret, and future panic, make us all question our place and decision making. The sounds of the street recording in the accompanying video are from Singapore and the two voices of the narrators are weaving in and out of one another to create a truly magnificent result. The narration, along with the mellow music, remind me of an artistic installation which you are likely to see in a modern contemporary gallery like the Tate Modern. That’s it – the sound is contemporary, urban, modern, and unique.
We move on to ‘Seven’ a poem by Kirsten Jane from Perth, Australia, a writer passionate about magic, realism and dreamy pros. Its about catching a train the wrong way whilst thinking about questions that she could never ask my father - he died from alcoholism in July - a piece that explores how grief infiltrates your daily routine and how it sometimes derails you. The music starts off with a humming, travelling up the key notes in this composition, the mellow music reminding of a piano playing in the foyer of a hotel bar, classy and dreamy all at once, a sweet melody drifting in smooth tones played purely with keys from the grand piano. Possibly a respectful ode and a send-off to Kirsten’s recently deceased father.
David Punter, a poet from the Echoes and Edges collective, who wrote the piece ‘Making a Day of it’ paired up with Bronwen Evans, a writer and poet from London living in Somerset who wrote ‘Sparrow’s Nest’. Both have similar theme of hopefulness and being in lockdown appreciating the little things in a day. Bronwen wants to echo in her work how it is important not to forget to thank ourselves as well – promoting self-love and wellbeing. The musical composition is very much themed around the rainforest, using the harp, a tambourine and Indonesian bamboo while towards the end the words ‘you can’t change the past, you can change the future’ is played on repeat reminding of gospel music, a choir chanting an echo!
Claire Davis, a poet from Vancouver, narrates her poem ‘Because Sculpture’ which speaks of the human condition in all of its machination. Her poetry sparsely captures moments with tension like the words themselves are holding their breath; poetry is how she makes sense of the world as if the broken pieces were clues to the whole. The music composition to this piece has a rustic quality, a warm and friendly sound, representing tradition, deterioration, the worn and the vintage, giving a feeling of the homely, the real and the lived, using a combination of an old keyboard with sweet strings of a cello. Claire’s poem offers a desirous feel, in tension and suspension, speaking of when you click with someone and you feel in sync with them that the world feels out of step with you, almost robotic; the couple in love become a sculpture, a piece of art, still and in harmony.
Finally, the last poet ends the show in a beautiful and positive note, written by Star Anderson from Ohio, USA, called ‘Building a City’ after watching ‘The Story of Us’ where a couple is contemplating divorce and separate for several months, though they have no huge issues like infidelity in their relationship they got caught up in the small issues. She reminds us that we need to care about those we cherish. The repetition ‘I want to build a city with you’ makes you feel like you want to build and grow a beautiful, loving world – a family. Star mentions ‘making a house a home’, the wholesome feeling of marriage, love, and family. The finger clicking and the clapping morph into a jazzy rhythm of music, the whooping and humming adds a warm blues-y touch to the song, the magic just travels until it’s time for curtain-close, so take a bow!
As we come to the end of the evening it is apparent how poets and musicians have come together to lift each other up during a creative and collaborative night together. The idea of togetherness tonight has been the highlight of my night.
If you are interested in the spoken word, this is a very unique way to express your poetry so why not consider taking part in the next one? You can get in touch with Charlie + Jake at echoesandedges.co.uk and don’t forget to subscribe to their YouTube channel at ‘Echoes and Edges’.
Written by Maria Nicolette
Maria Nicolette is a Writer and PR Assistant, and a “constant contradiction”, she won’t hide her taste for ‘prestige’, is proud to announce everywhere she goes her achievements ‘graduating with MSc Management from Cass Business School’ or ‘worked at Coutts Private banking and in KPMG as an intern’. She loves luxury and fashion, and loves her mum too - who works in Harrods and buys her the best designer clothes! She seems a snob, but really a life of hard hits has grounded her, with a disability she strives to live according to her values; fairness, equality, helping others, female empowerment, disability inclusion. She enjoys giving back, she volunteers at the Brain Injury Hub as PR assistant writing articles for the ‘news’ section. She loves art and culture; she volunteers for Camden Arts Centre and spends a lot of money investing in street art and a lot of her spare time visiting galleries and museums. She is the dark horse in her family and a bit of an entertainer; she worked as a feature film extra for Mission Impossible 5, has taken part in the NHS 111 video, has done modelling for four years, and been amateur singing with her friend’s band. She loves graphic novels and would love to write her own in collaboration with an illustrator (apply within) – and is a bit of a goth and a geek, she isn’t impartial to some MMO gaming, loves fantasy fiction and sci-fi, and has cosplayed as Abigail Whistler.