Oana Avasilichioaei, Chambersonic

 

Fellow Statements, Fellow Murmurs

Fellow statements, fellow hungry mouths, fellow introverts, fellow inner voices, fellow dynamic duets, fellow quiet revolutions, fellow unheroic holograms, fellow calls to justice, fellow pacts, fellow linguistic migrants, I call on you. // Fellow bonds, borders, and bodies that won’t be silenced, bellow bones that won’t be disappeared, fellow fierce rattling and unshackling, fellow divergent voices, fellow dissidents and discordants, I call on you. // Fellow tantrums and episodic madnesses, fellow imaginary voices that refuse to be forgotten, fellow phantoms, fellow ghosted and silenced, fellow unsung marginals, fellow musical mastodons struggling against extinction, fellow rejects, fellow ephemera, fellow notes, notations, marginalia, magic markers, fellow believers and non-believers and disbelievers and beyond-believers, I call on you. // Fellow murmurs and fissures, whispers and cracks, rumblings and time gaps, fellow articulations and disarticulations, fellow thoraxes and tongues, fellow dreamers, mystics, and visionaries, I call on you. // Fellow mispronounced, mistreated, misunderstood, misengineered, misallocated, misinformed, misrepresented, I call on you. Pronounce your part.

Furthering the evolution of Montreal poet, translator and performer Oana Avasilichioaei’s explorations around sound, language, meaning and performance comes Chambersonic (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), her seventh-full length poetry title over the past twenty years. Beginning with her debut, Abandon (Toronto ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2005), and continuing with feira:a poempark (Wolsak & Wynn, 2008), Expeditions of a Chimæra (with Erín Moure; Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010), We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012), Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019) [see my review of such here], Avasilichioaei’s work has moved from origins of language, translation and between-ness into a poetics deeply engaged with the intersections (within the between-ness, as well) of text, sound and performance. “It begins with desire.” the section “Chambersonic : Soundpace // Eavesdropping / on the Process of a Dilettante Composer,” subtitled “(on the making of Chambersonic : Episodes for an Absent Film),” begins [with back-slashes set here as included in the text, not as line-break notation], “A longing for what is yet to be conceived. Faint and fragmentary glimmers of ideas, sound heard in the mind’s ear: elongated resonances, long drawn-out frequencies advancing and receding in waves, layers, reverberations // static, silent extensions // sometimes sparse, sometimes full // a sea of glass, a more active, rougher sea of surf and foam and wind // plucked chords // long vocal vowellings fading into breathlessness.”

Chambersonic is constructed as a long poem across fifteen sections/scores, two bridges and an opening breath, “Chambersonic Intro: Fellow Statements,” a poem subtitled “(an audio work & lathe-cut vinyl / imagined from Fellow Statements, Fellow Murmurs, 04:48),” a five stanza/prose block text that begins: “Breath The closing of the door transforms the sound studio into a cocoon. / Soft light demarcates the edges, while at the centre stands a simple install- / lation: a small table, chair, recorder, and two vocal microphones. The outer / world seems unfathomably distant in both time and space.” The scale of this project is impressive, incorporating intervals, echoes, sound scores and layerings, as Avasilichioaei’s Chambersonic not only holds the full-length collection as her field of composition but one that incorporates sound and breath as foundational, echoing off the boundaries of the physical object of the book. “Voices will one day ignite and spill over,” she offers, to open the section “Chambersonic : Echoes,” “fill in new fractures. They will not / retract but keep on spilling.”