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Double Extension: Henri Chopin’s audiopoem performances

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2025

Caitlin Woolsey
Caitlin Woolsey*
Affiliation:
Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts, USA
*
Corresponding author: Caitlin Woolsey; Email: cwoolsey@clarkart.edu
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Abstract

The French poet Henri Chopin (1922–2008) was one of a generation of experimental young artists around 1955 who recognised new possibilities for innovation in the realm of expanded sonic assemblage that is at once viscerally embodied and highly mediated. The catalyst: the newfound availability and affordability of the portable reel-to-reel tape recorder. This article examines the relation between Chopin’s recorded ‘audiopoems’, which were built up over time by means of distortion, layering and looping, and the artist’s unusual approach to performing live with these recorded compositions. Through strategies of aural assemblage, including physically tampering with the tape, randomly cutting and splicing the reels, and accentuating feedback, Chopin circulated the voice in new ways, both intimate and collective. This article considers how he experimented with live performance as mediation par excellence, harmoniously juxtaposing live improvisation with the preceding mediation of sound recording technology, to create a ‘double extension’ that generated feedback as well as improvisatory spaces of encounter. This article examines several projects – both realised and speculative – as well as archival accounts of performances in the 1960s and 1970s to reflect on Chopin’s unwavering commitment to the very human scale, individual and collective, of mediated expression.

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Organised Sound , Volume 30 , Issue 2: Perspectives and trajectories in spatial music and sonic art , August 2025 , pp. 221 - 228
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

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