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Jaap Blonk, "Vocalor"

To the uninitiated, Blonk sounds like a madman - babbling excitedly in non-languages, spitting guttural noises and pitched burps like a Speak-N-Spell rewired by a lunatic. He's quite sane, and enormously entertaining, an avid devotee of the obscure history of sound poetry.

Dadaist and surrealist poets were drawn to the rhythm of language, applying their cut-up and repetition techniques to words, vowel sounds, consonant clusters and lip and lingual sounds. The results can be as stirringly meditative as Velimir Khlebnikov's "Kolokol Uma (Ringing The Bell of Mind)" or as playful as Blonk's own "Geen Krimp," an exhaustive study in the Dutch language's most problematic letter combinations (lots of "gr"s and "krs"), and the playful lip farts of "Labior." At the other extreme of this vocal-lore is Man Ray's "Lautgedicht," a text with all words gleefuly "XXXXX"-ed out, performed by Blonk like a Conehead love-call. Blonk's choking-victim gurgle and spirited brays, whoops, smacks and hoots would get him tossed from even the most liberal restaurant, making Vocalor the perfect vicarious thrill for those who have had it with the snotty properiety of their local art scene.