Cloud circuit q&a
By Ado Nkemka
A grainy image of Cloud Circuit in a dark room. Jeremy Young is on the left, Deanna Radford is on the right.
Read a Q&A with Jeremy Young and Deanna Radford ahead of October 27th concert at High Line Brewing. Co-presented with Bug Incision.
Jeremy Young
How did you become poetrysound artists?
This is kind of a funny question but in all seriousness, we have immense respect for artists who use their voice, their mouth and throat, and their deconstruction of the fundamental sonifications of language, that I would slump all together as "sound poets" (despite their likely pleas to the contrary!), and we figured we couldn't really touch that artistry by association! In all poetry or performative text there's an element of re-sounding words and syllables and Deanna does some of that, but this isn't the core of what we're trying to achieve with Cloud Circuit. RATHER! We decided to flop it around in an effort to draw attention to the combinations of "sound" and "poetry" as the space where we think our innovation lives. Because we're not simply a sound or musical act, nor are we just spoken word, but hopefully more than the sum of both parts.
Other than vocals, what piece or gear, instrument, or plugin, could your work as Cloud Circuit not live without? Why?
I don't use this as much as I probably should, but if I took it out of the equation something really crucial would be lost, and that's... the radio. I sometimes stylize it as "the" radio, because people will say "I love listening to THE radio" when semantically they're listening to the signal being transmitted and received along the electromagnetic radio wave spectrum. The radio itself can be an instrument too, and Deanna's words often braid, both around themes relating to being within that experience of radio transmission and reception, and within the sounds of my radios and their own voices, so... yeah. It's a pretty essential tool of sonification herein.
Does travel influence your sound (or output), if so how?
This is such a solid question! I think I'd like to say two quick things about this. Firstly, that there are some elements of travel that are the kinds of variable I personally try to mitigate as much as possible when I go on the road because neither Deanna nor I are in young enough to withstand the tiring effects of sleeping in different cities every night. But what travel does bring is the experience of performing in different spaces with varying acoustic responses and audience responses, their energies and emotions, which absolutely influence our sound in those moments. Every show becomes a bit of a perfect slow flake. I think Deanna and I would both agree that we're sort of a "live band" first, and a studio project second. There's just a magic that happens when we're on stage that brings our creative verve together so the more we travel the more we're able to engage with that.
Can you send us a picture of the most exciting part of your work as a duo?
Clear wax in all the punk glory of the 7" form.
Photo by Éliott Légaré
If you didn’t describe yourselves as a poetrysound group, what other label would you give yourself?
"Dramatic unholyist vibers", "Sensitivity conductors from sand to sky", "Purveyors of events of mouth air and touch air".
What is a track someone should hear before your performance on the 27th?
"Four Ersatz Phrases in Dactylic Hexameter for Sea (S) & Cloud (C)" for exactly one reason: "Somebody science-washed strata-forms... shhhhhh!"
What are you most looking forward to as it relates to the upcoming concert on October 27th?
Bug Incision! Classic Canadian weirdo gathering! I can't wait to be a part of that freaky chemistry and play for a room of Prairie deep listeners! :)
A grainy, black and white image of Cloud Circuit sitting at a table with their instruments. Deanna Radford is on the left and Jeremy Young is on the right.
Deanna Radford
How did you become poetrysound artists?
I agree with how Jeremy puts it - it captures well the site of in-betweenness where we operate in terms of form. We aren't married to any certain genre to represent our sound. "Poetrysound" feels like a good fit because it conveys two accurate pieces of information but it's also disjunctive: the word "poetry" doesn't point to an explicitly sonic thing and, and "sound" could be so many things when not coupled with an easily recognizable pairing like "art" or "poetry"? "Poetrysound" feels strangely familiar and is simultaneously not strange when placed near more commonly used terms such as sound art or sound poetry. Cloud Circuit is neither of these things but they, along with so many other forms or genres of music, poetry, and sound, shape what we do.
Jeremy and I met through a mutual friend years back. At the time I told him that I had started sharing my poetry in public and community spaces. Jeremy is a longtime musician with his group Sontag Shogun, as a solo artist, and in other collaborations. He asked me right then if I wanted to collaborate sometime and we did!
I have always been a writer but didn't always identify as one. For a good portion of my life, I've presented or promoted music, sound art, and adjacent events and wrote about these things for a long time. These experiences informed how I arrived at poetry and stayed with it for the sheer fun of it. I think that both Jeremy and I have an intrinsic interest in listening closelydeeply and that this informs how we meet in performance.
Other than vocals, what piece or gear, instrument, or plugin, could your work as Cloud Circuit not live without? Why?
What gives me great pleasure to perform with is paper. It reflects part of my relationship to the words that I write and speak. It's a visual and occasionally sonic aspect of my communication with Jeremy and the audience. It's a technology that I think we take for granted but that's integral to how the world works. Like the smartphone but from a much older place, it's not unrelated to the lineage of communications technologies used for empire, extraction, and domination. I'm very interested in how we are entwined with communication technology and explore this in my poetry.
Does travel influence your sound (or output), if so how?
DEA: Yes and no! Cloud Circuit has had the privilege to perform in some incredible places away from where we live and while travel isn't the reason for what we do, the chance to listen to the spaces that we perform in and to the people who move within them makes each performance site-specific. We want to let the sound and energies of each site where we perform into what we bring to the stage. Like a corporeal human feedback loop. That energy is magical and this type of connection makes me feel ecstatic.
If you didn’t describe yourselves as a poetrysound group, what other label would you give yourself?
Yes! DUV (Dramatic unholyist vibers) feels right.
What is a track someone should hear before your performance on the 27th?
”A letter from the cloud eternal network.” Listen on Bandcamp.
What are you most looking forward to as it relates to the upcoming concert on October 27th?
I haven't been to Alberta in a while. I'm stoked to be taking it all in soon, to meet the presenters and co-performers who I haven't met before. I'm from Winnipeg and feel a kindred connection to the Prairies in all of its shapes. Let's go!
Cloud Circuit bio
Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) based poetry_sound ensemble Cloud Circuit finds inspiration in communication gli//tc;hh()h, brok()n spee?()-eech, and contact lost. Its motors are the grey areas of connection, those lost threads, dropped signals, failures of technology, and outages at the edge of night. Poet Deanna Radford channels her iterative text reams as deconstructed words of mouth, and sound artist Jeremy Young plays sine waves in flux, 1/4" magnetic tape and captured radio airs. In performance, Cloud Circuit’s approach is collaborative and improvisational; its sound composed, dissected, and refracted. They have shared the stage with Sam Prekop, Lea Bertucci, David Grubbs, Vito Ricci, Ora Clementi (crys cole & James Rushford), Jessica Pavone, skintone, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Paul Dutton, Sarah Pagé, Greg Davis, and many others. Their début EP, Bur sting brea k'r, was issued by Archive Officielle in the thawing months of 2020 on clear vinyl. Cordially, The Cloud Eternal Network.
