Susan Howe & David Grubbs Concordance

"Howe is a poet who has spent her career reminding us that our experiences of meaning and sound are synchronous." (Tess Taylor, The New York Times)Concordance is Susan Howe's and David Grubbs's fifth album in the unexpected and richly satisfying collaboration that began with Thiefth and includes Souls of the Labadie Tract, Frolic Architecture, and WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER. Where these works feature the fragmentation and multiplication of Howe's recorded voice-in a style akin to her celebrated text collages-with Concordance they've pared down their materials to voice and piano, aspiring to the hushed intensity of their live performances. After fifteen years of working together, the subtleties of inflection and interaction that previously resulted from Howe's nuanced delivery and Grubbs's composition using recorded materials now arrives as unadorned duo performance.Howe's text for Concordance originates in a collage poem of the same name published by Grenfell Press, which then became the title work in her most recent book, published to acclaim by New Directions in 2020. She has continued to rework the text for this performed version, incorporatingmaterial from her 2015 book of essays, The Quarry. Her source material is scissored from print Concordances of the poetry of Milton, Herbert, Arnold, Browning, Dickinson, and Coleridge as well as old field guides to birds, rocks, trees, moths, and mushrooms; Howe's fiery commitment to placing these echoes of the past in dialogue with the present speaks to her position as one of America's essential artists.