Lee Ranaldo "Noise Recitation: Against Refusing" (Barcelona International Poetry Festival 15/05/2011)

Virreina Palace in Barcelona was the perfect setting for "Noise Recitation: Against Refusing", last Lee Ranaldo's poetic performance, inside the events of Barcelona International Poetry  Festival (year after year, more advanced and more multimedia), that expanded the audience eyes and radars. This literary experiment from the Sonic Youth member creates poetry from the search of images and pills on short syntagmas received from daily spam e-mail: "Hellofrom American Desert” (Water Row Books, 2007, with illustrations by Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood) or the recent "Against Refusing" (Water Row Books, 2010, with illustrations by Leah Singer) involve strange bedfellows on paper: the union of virtual and robotic creation versus authorship creation, abstract electronic material destined to swell the recycle bin but now a high-priced item on the website of the publisher... Lee Ranaldo’s proposal is focused on dadá and beat lyrical discourse, a free disposal of ideas that especially emphasize the importance of the creative process, nothing strange, of course, to his irreverent intellect. This is precisely the best claim for translating the concept to the stage. In his suspended guitar session in Barcelona (Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and Enrique Morente made a similar session for the Sonic Youth Etc.: Sensational Fix exhibition last yearat CA2M in Móstoles, Madrid), Ranaldo accompanied his atonal and noisy verses with the surreal images from the french underground filmmaker Pierre Clémenti. Lee Ranaldo hatched in an escapist's fifty minute interval, where text and feedback, distortion and performance merged into a stimulating visual poem between the musician and his independent and floating guitar, sealed and stamped with a word ("organometallic"), which would have delighted the great catalan visual poet, Joan Brossa. Mysteriously exciting.

(c) second picture from LR and video: barcelona + poesia