Concrete Voices and Resonant Bodies

In 1955, the French artist Henri Chopin acquired a small portable tape recorder, newly commercially available. This impulsive purchase would prove decisive in the development of a new kind of experimental sound poetry, one in which the voice was rendered both “concrete” and heterogeneous. Chopin used the device to project, amplify, and multiply the sonic micro-particles and intensities of his own voice. Around the same time, William S. Burroughs deployed the metaphor of tape-recorded transmissions to explore how the voice might function like a virus, as in his cut-up novel The Ticket that Exploded. This essay considers the relationship between the tape recorder and the intimate voice made public in the work of Burroughs and Chopin, exploring how each artist addressed the material conditions of the tape recorder to elicit the uncomfortable intimacies of the body in different ways, in multiple media, and, more importantly, to different ends.