Annelyse Gelman is the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone (2014). She was the inaugural poet-in-residence at UCSD’s Brain Observatory in 2012, the 2013 Lavinia Winter Fellow at New Pacific Studio, and a 2016 Fulbright recipient in Berlin for her work with the intersection of poetry, music, and film.
Her poetry-films have been screened in Germany’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, the FilmPoem Festival in Antwerp, dotdotdot in Vienna, Arcanum Video & Animation Festival in Slovenia, and the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival. Her work appears in TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, the PEN Poetry Series, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.
About Repulsion is a collaborative EP between Annelyse Gelman and programmer Jason Grier, exploring vulnerability and intimacy through samples from Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Max Ritvo, and Carl Phillips, and rigorous production mechanisms from overloaded CPU chips to rattled ice. Through this EP, Annelyse and Jason explore the meaningful intertwining and intersecting of word and sound.
In this interview, Annelyse Gelman talks with Margaret Zhang about obtaining spontaneous field recordings, meeting Jason in Berlin, writing for an EP rather than for the page, and building Midst, a digital platform for writers and readers to share their authentic creative processes.
MZ: What does the record name About Repulsion mean to you?
AG: The record is thematically concerned with intimacy and violence. Risk and vulnerability are at the heart of any close relationship, but there’s also an inherent paradox in the tension between wanting to know others and to be known by them. If someone comes to understand you, it can become more difficult to change because, in changing, you will become something that they don’t understand anymore. So there’s this tug between attraction and repulsion—people wanting to know each other without that knowing becoming a kind of trap.
MZ: Favorite track from About Repulsion?
AG: I love them all for different reasons. As far as the production process goes, I really love “Rain.” It’s composed of all these field recordings that Jason and I made—there must’ve been several dozen. For each one, I sang the same song a capella in a different location—a basketball court, a Turrell Skyspace, an old church in Germany, etc. Then we used Jason’s Seurat software to do the splicing and arrangement of all of those field recordings, like a kind of sonic landscape flipbook. “Nausea” is perhaps the most spontaneous track—I love how organically it came together. All of the songs were originally written on my guitar, and for this one we wanted to replace the fingerpicked guitar line with a piano drone recorded with an Ebow (an electronic bow that you can use to cause the piano strings to resonate). We went to a Guitar Center in a strip mall in Austin to get one, but they were out of stock, and I ended up just grabbing a demo guitar off the floor and playing it impromptu through the amp it was set up with—no adjusting it or anything—and asked Jason to wander around the store with my phone recording in Voice Memos. There happened to be a random dude sitting a few feet away from me testing out a different guitar, so those are in the recording too: you can hear he starts out playing metal riffs and trying to do his own thing, and then gradually starts playing along with the repetitive chords and the rhythm of the song. That’s the basis for the entire recording. We didn’t overdub anything else besides my vocals and some folks practicing drums in the shop. The lead guitarist is totally anonymous.
MZ: When you and Jason first met in Berlin, what drove you to collaborate? What is your working dynamic like?
AG: When I met Jason, his label (Human Ear Music, now HEM) had already put out a lot of interesting experimental pop, and he was already combining that with his day job as a programmer, making really gorgeous sound libraries and the technology to sort through them and use them to compose.
Our working dynamic was really fruitful for me. I was at the beginning of learning to think about sound and tone as a medium in itself, not just as a way to get my songwriting down. We started the way I used to start with my more traditional bands—me bringing my guitar over, playing through a song with just a guitar part and lyrics and melody, and saying, what should we do with this? Jason advocated for a technical, conceptual approach based on his experience with sound art and experimental music, and I took on more of the role of advocating for the heart of the songs. The trick, I think, was to employ these sometimes alienating, estranging techniques without losing the emotional core. Our main collaboration right now is this project called Midst. It’s an entirely new way of working together. I’ve been thinking a lot about digital writing processes. The actual act of writing is incredibly private; I can’t write a poem with another person sitting next to me, with the possibility that they might see what I’m working on. As a result, no one but the writer ever sees what happens when a poem gets made. With my own process, for example, I usually write poems on a computer, and end up copying and pasting lines frequently, writing the last line first, pasting in references and quotations that I’ll later delete, and so on. And I kept wondering what other people’s writing processes look like. What if I could record my process somehow, and other people could record theirs, and we could share it with each other without actually invading each other’s privacy?
Anyway, I was obsessing over this idea for a year or two, and one day I mentioned it to Jason. I think it took him like an hour to make a demo of what ultimately became this amazing custom word processor that records and archives and lets you share the writing process. It took us another two years to actually build it properly, but now it exists and it’s even better than I imagined. We have huge plans for it. Right now, the main focus is a poetry journal (also called Midst) that publishes poems along with their process histories. I sent out the software to a bunch of different poets and asked them to write brand-new poems in it, and we launched the first issue of the journal in December. It’s been super exciting, bringing that to life, and bringing our collaborative dynamic—to oversimplify, Jason’s “How does this need to work?” expertise with my “How does this need to feel?” expertise—to a completely different field.
MZ: How did you get into writing and playing music?
AG: I started playing guitar in 2009. I was in college, and one of my friends, Willa, had an extra guitar and gave it to me. I mostly played covers, and then after a couple years I had my heart broken and—of course!—started writing my own songs.
MZ: Why has Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song” stuck with you?
AG: It’s one of my favorite poems. It has the whole world in it.
MZ: Tell me about the video for “Does It Make You Feel Alive to Sing?”
AG: I was in Berlin. It was winter, and only a few weeks after Jason and I had met. We were walking around and ended up at Görlitzer Park. I grew up in California and went to college in Portland, so Berlin was the first place I lived that had a real winter. I talked earlier about knowing and being known—this felt like an important moment in that dynamic. I left the camera running while we made snowmen and watched rabbits and during my walk home. I really love the way the digital noise from this high-ISO, low-budget shot turns the relatively monochromatic nighttime scene into an explosion of pixelated color.
MZ: How does writing for the page differ from writing for something that is listened to?
AG: It’s super different. I’ve done several commissions in the past year, including two different ekphrastic compositions for performance—one in response to José Parlá’s mural “Amistad América” and one in response to Tavares Strachan’s “We Belong Here (Blue)”.
When I’m making a text that’s meant to be read aloud, first impressions are important in a different way. People are going to hear it just once; they can’t pause to reflect. So it tends to require more immediacy and straightforwardness, but hopefully in a way that still rewards deeper attention. Obviously, there’s a lot you can do with pacing, tone of voice, etc. When I first started writing, I tried to take poems and turn them into lyrics. But that didn’t work out, because the way my poems engage with sound and rhythm is not really “musical,” or at least it’s a very different kind of music. Structures (especially repetitive ones) that engage me in songs can tend to register as flat, or even boring, in a poem.
For songwriting, I usually begin with sound, instruments, and field recordings, trying to feel the emotional resonance of that. The music dictates the text.
MZ: Poem you’ve written that you are most proud of?
AG: Pride is not really something I feel about my work. I feel “responsible” for the work in the sense that I need to show up for it, not in the sense that it’s something I ought to take credit for in an egoistic way, if that makes sense? It’s almost like when people say they’re proud of their children—the kids are their own people, not the products of their parents. I don’t feel like I’m putting “myself” into the work, even when it’s personal; what’s important is paying attention to the world. Hopefully, if I do a good job, things will announce themselves.
MZ: What are some other projects that you and Jason are excited about (both individual and collaborative)?
AG: I’m very excited about Midst. For me, it was always this crazy idea that I thought would never happen, but now it’s actually happening. I’m excited about the vulnerability of the project: having people see how everyone else goes through drafts, how other people arrive at their poems.
I spent last summer in Switzerland at the Jan Michalski Foundation. They have a bunch of tiny houses that have each been designed by a different architect. I’m definitely excited about the work I did there, particularly a book-length poem with a lot of different interwoven threads. One of the threads is about plant intelligence: it questions what counts as knowledge, and what counts as intelligence. What counts as thought.