Franz Mon (born 1926) is a pioneer in the field of concrete, visual and phonetic poetry. He once licked the new radio play into shape like no other german-speaking playwright before him. As a sound poet and with his 'articulations' or phonetic pieces, he conceptually renewed sound poetry in the postwar years.A tension of research is generated. Franz Mon is a tireless researcher, his material is language. In "Artikulationen" he speaks of " the dance of the lips, of the tongue, of the teeth, movements of substance which creates by itself its own directions at the threshold of articulation... the vocal vibrations absorb the air, disfigure it, throw it back, suck it in, creating sonic substances which are elastic, somber, soft, brilliant, wide, harsh... the primitive cry, exteriorizing itself, becomes a signal variably interpretable... the more intense the impulse, the more radical is the expression and the more definite is the separation from the I who speaks". A typical example is his research on the transformations from phoneme to phoneme caused by gradual changes of the sonic compounds, a process inverse to that of Chlebnikov's homophonies: in place of the fusion between words or suffixes or prefixes and roots to form a new sonic entity, Mon practices the scission of the phonic a word, which becomes other and then other again, changing its colour in verbal terms which are always different and always changing.
This LP collects some of Mon's earliest concrete phonetic poems recorded 1962-64 as well as the radioplay 'Ich bin der ich bin die' from 1971.
Edition of 400 copies.
