Ann Southam, sean o huigin

While we're knocking off personal Holy Grail titles, here's an absolute corker; Ann Southam's 1973 Electronic Realization of the poet sean o huigin's "Sky-Sails." A continuous melding of o huigin's recitation against a coterie of keening, upper-register tweeter-zap electronics - theoretically largely c/o the Moog equipment installed in the University of Toronto's UTEMS - this floats on atonal clusters before erupting into "Persona" -esque thunderclaps of Ring-Modulated & Envelope-Followed voice structures in a manner not all that dissimilar to Ruth White's reading of Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil", Ralph Swickard's "Sermons of Saint Francis / Hymn of Creation", Herbert Eimert's "Epitaph Für Aikichi Kuboyama", or Ivan Pequeño's "¡Ahora!".

This Creel Pone replica edition nicely encapsulates the entire known Southam / o huigin collaborative effort by including the titular LP, plus both sides of the bonus 7" included with o huigin's 1978 Black Moss Press tome "Poe (Tree)", as well as an excerpt of their music for Aiko Suzuki's "Cricket", written about in detail by o huigin in 1984 in Issue 31 of The Capilano Review as "A Few Sound Thoughts"; the pages in question reproduced herein. There's even a tiny reproduction of the "Sky-Sails" lithograph-insert via watercolor stock; not too shabby.