Zara Joan Miller + Ute Kanngießer – Blue Monday All Night Flight Records

Label: Reading Group – rg28
Format: Vinyl, LP
Country: US
Released: 2023
Genre: Experimenal
Style: Sound-art, Sound Poetry, Spoken Word

Reading Group is very happy to announce the release of Blue Monday, a new LP from Zara Joan Miller and Ute Kanngießer. The LP is the result of the first live collaboration between the poet/artist Miller and the cellist/improvisor Kanngießer, recorded at London’s Cafe Oto in January of 2023. Kanngießer’s searching, intensive cello lays an amorphous terrain beneath passing fragments of Miller’s poetry (from her 2022 book of the same name from JOAN Publishing), billboards dotting the interior freeway of liminal perception. The micro-world of spectral and textural details within the cello sound seems to dramatize or mirror the micro-world of unspoken implications left unsaid in the gaps between threads of language. At times, these worlds produce a dull anxiety or a quiet fervor, only to be scattered by the occasional swerve to a poetic delivery reminiscent of slow-motion jokes (“I once saw a sign on the side of a road it said SLOW DUST”), a fortuitous error (“a seagull shitting on my face is home”), a mysterious interruption of domestic boredom (“someone’s girlfriend called to say don’t answer”). Occasional dates progressing through time give the sense that we are being driven through a year of blue Mondays, the cello wandering as if seasonally. The live set having been accompanied by a literal slideshow of some cumulative, fictive vacation adds to this sense of the year in review. But the imperceptibility of (tonal and narrative) space between these entry/fragments bring us beyond the stark view of the calendrical and into something less measurable: the space of a syncope: “to witness your life unfolding she said / is the key getting stuck.”

Tracklist

1. Blue Monday Side A 22:54
2. Blue Monday Side B 23:38

Blue Monday by Zara Joan Miller and Ute Kanngießer