Composer, pianist and producer Peter Vukmirovic Stevens has teamed up with the prolific punk poet Penny Rimbaud to create ‘S LENCE’, a contemporary experiment of balance between piano and spoken word. It’s released on November 25th on One Little Independent avant-garde subsidiary Caliban Sounds.
Rimbaud’s apocalyptic and dramatic narration is delivered with vivid fervour, while Stevens uses an elegant, emotive approach to counter it. Both find harmony in juxtaposition.
Lyrically Rimbaud explores a terrain he’s spent much of his later career addressing; themes of antimilitarism and the grim details of historic conflict. War is a disturbing, monstrous entity across his poetry, with deeply descriptive prose placing his listener in the dirt itself. As befits his anarcho past, a lot of the writing discusses authority, with the relationship between the privileged and marginalised investigated fully. Wrestling oneself from under the boot of power and the radical fight for freedom may well be his wheelhouse, but here Penny Rimbaud is accompanied by something completely new.
The solo compositions from Peter Vukmirovic Stevens were written specifically for these expressive tirades. Penny tells us it was a “highly unconventional approach. In 2019, Peter selected some of my many poems which he wanted to set to music. He then asked me to arrange to have a recording made of me reading them minus any accompaniment. This I did at Old Street Studios with Harvey Birrell engineering and Eve Libertine chiding me on. I had no idea how Peter intended to compose the music as normally such things are either done together or based on a musical idea. In short, I had nothing to react to or work around except the beating of my heart – SILENCE”.
The piano arrangements are graceful, melancholy, and often themselves feel expository, an instrumental story running underneath a theatrical dialogue. It’s a soundscape that sets a striking new tone, while also giving the pieces space for emotional depth.
Of the process Stevens says “For our first experiment, I wrote a single piece for piano with a draft recording of his voice, and it sounded great. We felt that something here was working. Later, he sent me eight terrifically recorded poems and a little booklet with the texts. After some drafts were ready, Penny visited me at my studio in Paris for a couple of days, where I had a residency at the Cité des Arts. I played some of the pieces, and we talked about how they might all fit together. I reworked the pieces through 2020, a complicated year for reasons we’re all familiar with. At the end of 2021, I recorded the 11 pieces over two days in Paris with an excellent engineer Sami Bouvet. We mixed the piano and voice to support each other and yet maintain their independence. I also included three solo pieces, bookends, and an interlude, which serve as calm tableaux and a contrast to the sometimes rousing sound of the piano and voice. The end results were as I hoped they would be. Our parts maintain their powerful connection and support each other in a balanced way”.
‘S LENCE’ is an affecting listen, the shadows of its subject matters loom heavily, giving each track their own ominous, haunting character. With complementary classical backing, however, it’s gifted with a lighter touch, one that also makes it a delicate, enchanting expedition.
About Penny Rimbaud
In 1977, alongside Steve Ignorant, Penny Rimbaud co-founded seminal anarchist punk band Crass, who disbanded in 1984. Up until 2000, he devoted himself almost entirely to writing, returning to the public platform in 2001 as a performance poet working alongside a wide variety of jazz musicians. In 2003, together with Crass vocalist Eve Libertine, he founded what was at first known as ‘The Crass Collective’, then ‘The Crass Agenda’, then ‘The Last Amendment’ and finally ‘L’Académie des Vanités’ – a loose collective of jazz musicians, artists and filmmakers who shared Rimbaud’s lifelong interest in progressive, improvisational art. Rimbaud, a veteran of avant-garde performance art groups such as EXIT and Ceres Confusion, not only co-founded Stonehenge Free Festival, but he also founded and, along with Gee Vaucher, to this day runs the legendary anarchist/pacifist open house Dial House in Essex. He founded Caliban Sounds, a label specialising in new music which, as he puts it, “might not otherwise get the hearing it deserves”.
About Peter Vukmirovic Stevens
Peter Vukmirovic Stevens is an award-winning composer, pianist and multimedia artist from Seattle, Washington. His compositions include works ranging from solo piano to symphony orchestra and reflect influences from contemporary art, literature, extensive travels, and ethnomusicology. He is Artistic Director and member of the Seattle Pianist Collective.
Art credit: Gee Vaucher and Allen Wootton
Track listing
- S lence
- Paper Devils
- Not They
- Of Summer’s Passing
- In Silence
- S lence II
- Within Dark Streams
- Shadows
- Pity in the Poetry
- I Am the Enemy
Production credits
Voice – Penny Rimbaud*
Piano – Peter Vukmirovic Stevens**
Recorded at Old Street Studios, London, by Harvey Birrell in July 2019*
Recorded and edited at Studio de Meudon, Paris, by Sami Bouvet in November 2021**
Mixed by Paul ‘PDub’ Walton at The Loft Studio, Surrey, in February 2022
Mastered by Alex Gordon at Abbey Road Studios, London, in March 2022
Produced by Penny Rimbaud
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