The stylus of the turntable drops to meet the record humming in its circular rotation, and the recording crackles to life, seemingly in medias res, amid quavering pulses of breath (La Mémoire). Listening closely to this “sound poem,” one may discern brief moments of silence between the straggling swells of respiration. By thirty seconds in, the poet-performer increasingly accentuates the wavering buzz of their breath, suggesting anxiety or edginess. At the end of the exhalations, one can discern them struggling to extend the breath further, then gasping, strangled. The poem unfolds as a performance of subtle control: the poet sustains one bodily cadence of the breath for a period of time before abruptly slipping into another, alternating slow surges, sharp humming, and hyperventilating huffs. These unexpected and progressively disorienting undulations produce an impression of heterogeneity, variability, and movement, despite the fact that the poem is composed of a single source and tonality: that of the breath. By improvising different physiological ways of extending, suctioning, thinning out, and cutting off the breath, the poet generates a surprising range of sonic materiality and affect.

This recording, La Mémoire (Memory), from 1967, was one of three experimental sound poems that the French artist Gil J Wolman released during his life.¹ In La Mémoire, perhaps the breath is meant to image the operations of memory itself: its cyclical nature, how it can be distended, extended, sped up; the ways in which memories may thin out and almost seem to evaporate; or, conversely, to solidify and accrue heightened density. Rather than hearing examples of memory symbolized, in La Mémoire the listener hears memory unspooling, as an active operation. In this sound poem, memory appears as an unfolding activity of human sound, externalized by the artist and imaged internally by the perceiving spectator.

With La Mémoire, using relatively simple means, Wolman shrewdly demonstrates that the voice, like the body, is not fixed, inert, or objective, but rather something formed, performative — and mediated. Wolman improvised this mégapneumie directly onto magnetic tape using a simple home tape recorder, without recourse to any manipulation, effects, or editing.² The possibilities offered by his home recording set-up were limited and not particularly sophisticated: he had just one circuit for feedback; he would record, and listen to that single input on headphones. He did, however, rely on a new generation of more sensitive microphones that by the mid 1960s were commercially available at affordable prices to amateurs. Rather than attempting to eradicate these idiosyncratic traces of human presence, Wolman used inexpensive microphones to exaggerate feedback, sonic blur, and distortion, imbuing recorded poetry with a kind of palpable physicality that is projected into the listener. Tellingly, “soufflé” (the term often used by Wolman when describing the character of his sound poems) denotes in French both human respiration and the hiss of microphone feedback. Wolman’s intentional use of distortion in these poems makes palpable the intervention of technology in the construction, mediation, and circulation of the breath.

But does the microphone hear what the ear hears — or how it hears? We might be tempted to understand the microphone as a technological prosthesis, an extension of the human neurobiology which re-trains the ear and triggers in us new auditory awareness.³ Wolman goes a step further in a piece like La Mémoire, inviting the listener to embrace a more heightened awareness of the range of expressive possibilities of the basic mechanics of bodily expression. The microphone, rather than scrubbing the voice of its idiosyncrasies and failures, was in the hands of Wolman instead used to re-embody the voice, and to vocalize the body. The artist turns microphone feedback into a body all its own: atmospheric sonic landscapes of the breath, which produce new auditory atmospheres and desires. These same distortions at once create sound effects and produce visceral aural images of the perpetual activity of a voice hearing itself projected back in, on, and to itself.

To put it another way, in a poem like La Mémoire, Wolman plied a microphone and a simple, portable home tape recorder to haptically image the breath. Wolman’s sound poems are innovative not due to the absence of language, or to the relative simplicity with which they were constructed, but rather because of how the artist used the simple tools of the breath, vocal noises, and the microphone to make us see sounds and hear images. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure formulated distinctions among signs, concepts, and sensations in ways that help to illuminate Wolman’s effect of crossing sound and vision. According to Saussure, a sign (such as a word) is in turn composed of two elements: an acoustic image and an idea. He cautioned, however, that we should not mistake the former as a sign of the latter, for there is no direct or necessary circuit between the acoustic imaginary and the concept. The acoustic image is the psychic imprint of a sound on the senses. Yet the acoustic images elicited across these artistic oeuvres cannot be confined to the production of a mental image, nor merely to imaging sound as it is recorded or as perceived by the listener. Rather than a novel kind of sound object or representation, the acoustic image is the circulation of perceptual attention between sound and image.

This essay considers how the breath — as a material and an instrument — operates in Wolman’s sound poems as a kind of touch. Wolman’s recordings remain little-known, even within scholarship on the European avant-garde after the Second World War, but they are instructive for thinking about the relations between the human body and media, and in particular shifts in the poetic sensibility of social relation and difference at this time. I propose that Wolman’s use of recording technology was principally a means to an end. It is in the interface of breath and technology that each element becomes an organ of touch. The question, then, becomes not what these poems “say,” but how.

In addition to being one of the only sound poems by Wolman that was available to a public audience (beyond those who could attend a relatively rare live performance), La Mémoire is instructive as an exemplar of Wolman’s sonic poetics: it embodies the artist’s straightforward, improvisatory vocal ululations, which extended the experiments of his Dada predecessors and Lettrist collaborators. When one listens to a sound poem like La Mémoire, the sense of proximity of the artist’s breath invades that listener’s own body, perhaps even threatens to overtake the pace of their breathing as they listen, producing a conflicting sense of intimacy and alterity.

A later sound poem from the late 1970s, Wolman et son double (Wolman and His Double), proves the exception to the rule. This poem features a rare instance of the artist manipulating the tape recording to fracture his own voice — a singular subject, as it were — into multiple “voices” of body noises, cries, and jumbled half-phrases. Wolman then brings these distinct voices into conversation, with one another through looping and layering the magnetic tape. In its titular reference to the vibrational and incantatory poetics of Antonin Artaud, Wolman et son double negotiates an auditory space of doubling that operates as a both/and of subject and other. This poem, which was not released until 2015 — two decades after the artist’s death — testifies to this hitherto unknown aspect of technological mediation and sonic assemblage within Wolman’s poetics.⁴ This essay brings together La Mémoire and Wolman et son double for the first time to consider how distinct and quite different sonic facture of each poem produces an experience more akin to multisensory touching than simply listening or looking. Wolman’s sound poems touch us, striving to connect even as they simultaneously inscribe difference.

In 1949, before Gil J Wolman began improvising these pneumatic sound poems, he was a young man of twenty, interested in poetry, the arts, and philosophy, navigating the Parisian metropole in the years immediately following the Second World War.⁵ It was at this time that he encountered the dynamic Romanian-born poet Isidore Isou, who was assembling a radical group of poet-artist-performers that he called the Lettrists. Isou’s didactic, snarling manifesto of Lettrism, which had been published in 1947, proposed that if language could be stripped down to an isolated, abstracted letter, the graphic symbol would become the basis of a new art. By avoiding fixed representation, whether of language or of images, the Lettrists strove to create a new poetics that would straddle the fertile intersections of text, music, and performance, and which would exercise a social function, one that avoided co-optation.⁶ After attending an evening of Lettrist poetry recitation at the Maison des Lettres, Wolman became enamored of the transgressive potential of this new poetics and promptly joined the Lettrists. (Figure 1) Within six months, he had developed his own distinct form of sound poetry.

Wolman primarily focused on varying, extending, and intensifying his inhalations and exhalations, as in La Mémoire. The sound poems often also feature throaty grunts, nasal wheezing, smacking of the lips, and the like. By using the breath and pneumatic body sounds as the primary and almost exclusive source material, Wolman quickly surpassed the modus operandi of most of the other Lettrists at that time, whose investigations more tightly adhered to formal, if avant-garde, precedents of Dada practitioners such as Hugo Ball, Raoul Hausmann, and Kurt Schwitters, or else to the trope of a musical chorale, which the Lettrists often reimagined as collective chants of nonsense strings of letters or onomatopoeic sounds.⁷ As he was first developing his approach, Wolman considered pursuing something more like music, but with its hierarchies (“its laws and old men”), he could not execute his work as he desired within that disciplinary framework. “So,” he explained simply, “I created ‘mégapneumes,’” composed of “sound, image, concept,” in a process which he classified as “a rarefaction of the poetic material.”⁸

To craft these earliest mégapneumes, Wolman would improvise and then re-transcribe these improvisations (he called his idiosyncratic notations “structural letters”); he was not yet relying on a microphone or tape recorder.⁹ (Figure 2) He soon abandoned these attempts to notate different kinds of sounds and ways of aspirating his sound poems, however, for he concluded that his inscriptions were always exceeded by, in his words, “all the human sounds” generated by the body.¹⁰ Indeed, while the mégpneumes generally privilege the sonic texture, ephemerality, and cadence of respiration, it is a misnomer that Wolman is invariably described as a breath-based poet. When one listens to these poems, the impression is not so much of works that thematize the breath as such, but rather of improvisations that seek to capture the inaudible or scarcely discernible, the stoppages and gaps that are part of the undulating movement of inhalation and exhalation. Fellow sound poet Henri Chopin understood this when he described Wolman’s poems as hiatus vulgaire, alluding to how the mégapneumes enact a separation that is at once a pause and an interruption (hiatus), a separation that is of the order of the natural body, and therefore quotidian and common to all (vulgaire).¹¹ Wolman himself variously described the mégapneumes as “physical poetry,” but also as something akin to “organic music.”¹² (“I don’t know if I made poetry or music,” Wolman noted in a later radio interview. “As you like. I made sounds.”¹³)

Wolman coined this term mégapneumie to invoke the poems’ respiratory tone (pneumatique) and underscore not just magnitude but also intensification and excess (mega). In one of the artist’s undated notebooks, four lines of script appear that read like a step-by-step narrative of the phenomenological experience of uttering mégapneumes: “First there is a beating inside the body, the pulse of blood and then the rustle of time, and a rising whisper…”¹⁴ This description reveals the divergent character of the mégapneumes: something corporeal, yet also temporal and fluid. While bodily, these poems remain linked to the voice — if not to speech as such, they bear traces of an impulse towards utterance.

As such, the mégapneumes marked a pivot in experimental poetics — the triumph of “the human sound,” according to Henri Chopin.¹⁵ This “human sound” is akin to what philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has called “buccality”: a pre-vocal mode of expression he describes as “the puffing of cheeks… the movement, the contraction and/or distension of breathing, of eating, of spitting…”¹⁶ Nancy argues that with the buccal act, nothing is articulated. Buccality is the nasal respiration and throaty guffaw of the mégapneumes — a body animated and alert, but expressing itself through means other than language. There is no coherent subject that says “I am.” To be a subject, one must have the capacity for speech; subjectivity is aligned with orality. If Nancy provides a philosophical formulation of the divide between buccality and orality, Wolman had already intuited this interplay, grounded in his mistrust not so much of language itself as of its susceptibility to passivity and ossification.

Wolman charted the divide between mégapneumes and other forms of language in a diagram scribbled, certainly with some irony, on the back of an announcement for an exhibition of Isidore Isou’s graphic work. Everyday language, Wolman asserts in this diagram, is taken in first by the ears, then the intelligence, and finally transmitted through identifiable images. His sound poems, on the other hand, move from the ears to other nerves and then to sensation. Intelligence and identifiable images appear on the periphery, outside the circuit. He thus declares his desire to traffic between the world (the thing perceived) and the sensation as subjectively experienced — at the level of the nervous system.¹⁷

Wolman undoubtedly aimed for a shock to the nervous system of listening. But the stakes are higher than that. For Wolman, the withdrawal of a notion of “sense” or meaning exposes a new potential for sonority — a form of expression out of speech, one that destabilizes notions of a stable, consistent “I.” The mégapneumes implicitly rebut Nancy’s separation of buccality and subjectivity. Wolman’s sound poems externalize the buccal. This is still the poetics of a subjectivity, Wolman seems to quietly suggest in La Mémoire — even if that gasping, overcome subject does not state themselves as a cogent, reflexive self. Wolman’s notebooks reference philosophical texts and the question of the subject, although he rarely invoked these concepts directly in his artwork. Nevertheless, in their source material, sonic sensibility, and materiality — all of which operate at the level of the body but also the effervescent, the pneumatic, the unfixed — the mégapneumes propose different ways of thinking about the constitution of subjectivity.

One key element is their lack of fixity. Wolman frequently recorded his poetic improvisations onto tapes that also documented other aspects of his everyday life: celebrations, his children telling tall tales, or popular songs he taped off the radio. He eventually recorded over many of these vernacular mégapneumes, which were almost always improvised in the comfort of his bedroom after a day at work. The magnetic tapes thus became an aural palimpsest of the ephemerality, physicality, and materiality of the breath and the subject. Perhaps, if we turn our thoughts again to La Mémoire, we might discern in this material history of the sound poems something of the dual fidelity, degradation, and layered construction of memory. The inconstancy of memory seems to mirror the unreliability of the subject position for Wolman. Elsewhere he wrote: “Let ‘X’ be the original. All art poses the elementary equation: movement of ‘X.’”¹⁸ The signifier is always variable. The original subject “I” that may change, or be exchanged.

In the late 1970s, Wolman created an unusually long mégapneumie that he called Wolman et son double (Wolman and His Double), a remarkable work that demonstrates the artist’s conceptually sophisticated strategies. While this piece exemplifies Wolman’s interests in dismantling language, improvisation, and aesthetic tactics of juxtaposition and separation, it is distinguished because it is unencumbered by the medium limitations of direct performance and recording, which limited the spectrum of auditory sounds, and particularly the range and layering of sounds, that the artist could achieve. The surprising verve of Wolman et son double stems from its sonic density and complexity, which is a direct result of Wolman manipulating the tape recorder to loop, layer, and distort his recorded voice, one of only two known instances of the artist doing so.¹⁹ In fact, this method was so unexpected for Wolman that scholars have previously misinterpreted this sound poem as featuring the two distinct voices: that of the artist and of his friend and fellow dissident Lettrist, Jean-Louis Brau.²⁰ This work may also be considered Wolman’s tour de force among his extent mégapneumes: typically they run no more than a few minutes (La Mémoire is just under three-and-a-half minutes), whereas by contrast, Wolman et son double stretches to half an hour.

The piece begins with a low drone, immediately overlaid by an exemplary instance of Wolman’s “physical poetry”: a hoarse hacking deep in the throat, a strangled gasp, repetitive coughs, twisting wheezes, rumbling reverberations, staccato hiccups, a shrill whine that thins towards asphyxiation. Wolman breathes and winces. He vocally mimes the impact of profound physical strain, sinking his voice deep into the lungs and the belly, and then abruptly taking off into the vertiginous whirr of compressed breath. Suddenly, alongside these physical utterances, a more human voice, something close to speech, emerges. Then a second voice interrupts, inserting itself. Periodically the two voices are staggered, but rather than suggesting a dialogue, an exchange or even a call and response, their interplay is that of interpolation. The two voices frequently overlap; in certain moments, one punctuates or “speaks” over the other. One of the human voices seems to embody a more aggressive role, while the other sounds more reactive, as if it is prey pursued. One wonders if we were meant to hear one part of the human voice tracking his alter ego, grappling with another aspect of his subjectivity — his double? If so, what kind of subject is being constructed?

The utterances are incomprehensible, ululations so blown out of proportion by the artist’s intentional proximity to the microphone, and then subsequently overlapped and overlaid, that only the cadence of language remains, not the meaning. This erasure of the meaning in the speech is intensified by intense guttural noises interjected overtop the thick, stumbling voices. At one juncture it sounds as though the dominant voice is going to vomit, but the expectorant is suspended between a burp and a more pleasing, melodic descending tone. Wolman simulates a blaring horn; a chattering and bawking chimpanzee; a rabid dog thrashing about, biting the air and foaming at the mouth: these harsh, animalistic sounds amplify the heightened precarity of the spoken exchange. The guttural breath-based and physical poetry that is familiar from a work like La Mémoire are calibrated by the roles of these distinct vocal “characters” within the unfolding piece, as well as a lyric sensibility and dramatic pacing, which are quite distinctive compared to the other mégapneumes.²¹ Are the a-linguistic expressions of animal nature attacking and overcoming the human? Amid the murky sonic atmosphere of the recording, it is difficult to parse the relations, or even where one vocalizing “subject” ends and another begins. In Wolman et son double, all of these different forms of voicing come together — speak over, alongside, against, and with one another — and fall apart.

To create this piece, Wolman first recorded a sequence of improvisations on a thirty-minutes-duration reel of magnetic tape. These are the passages that sound closer to language, if still garbled beyond comprehensible speech. He then intercut this initial reel of improvisatory vocalizing with another new series of improvised mégapneumes, creating both surprising interjections as well as layers of seemingly distinct voices. Additionally, Wolman looped sections of tape and amplified the echo effect at certain moments. The noise of feedback dials in and out throughout. A persistent, sharp thrumming sound never quite comes into focus. As for all the mégapneumes crafted in Wolman’s home studio, it is difficult to attribute this distortion entirely to the artist’s intentionality, as opposed to the provisional recording procedures and environment. But it is consistent with the artist’s aims that he would strain not only his own vocalizing to the point of collapse, but would also pressure the functionality of the microphone to the limits of intelligibility. Rather than detracting from the sound poems, this ambivalence feeds their affective power over the listener. Wolman intended for these sound experiments to be a space of discomfort, confrontation, uncanny intimacy, and alterity. It is within the openness created by such disruptions, he believed, that art could thrive, and meaningful encounters with art might arise.

This doubling is referenced explicitly in the poem’s title, which puns on Antonin Artaud’s seminal essay collection Le Théâtre et son double (The Theater and Its Double), published in Paris in 1938. In referring to Artaud’s writings so explicitly, Wolman points the listener to Artaud’s argument that language, including both vocalized dialogue and scripted text, had insidiously overtaken the ambiguous and spontaneous performativity and embodiment of theater — a stance that resonates with Wolman’s critique of how language shapes arts and human experience. There is also a more specific and direct connection between the two artists: Wolman’s deliberate decision to voice permutations and distensions of the term “grever,” which may mean “to put pressure on something,” but could also allude to the rocky texture of a pebble beach; in the noun form “grève” indicates a labor strike, an association that corresponded with workers’ strikes that were transpiring in France at this time. As uttered by Wolman in the recording, the syllables are garbled and distended, at certain moments clearer and at others almost ground between the teeth into little more than a groan. The sounded body of the word, one might venture, is distended, extended, and compressed, producing meaning across its different forms. All three of the meanings of this term bubble up through the tenor of Wolman’s delivery — duress, strain, halting activity, rupture.

Meanwhile, in the early 1930s Artaud had thematized the re-inscription of theater as a kinetic act of production — rather than a crystallized spectacle, as he believed it had become — as consistent with a strike. To strike down representation, to foreclose its ossified meanings by means of an opening, one could force the mode of production to shut down. In May 1932, the Nouvelle revue française published a short piece by Artaud that he penned on the occasion of a twenty-four-hour strike of Paris’s theaters, extolling the demonstrative closure as “a prodigious lift if atmosphere.”²² This literal strike may be read as a literal closure, as well as the more symbolic stoppage of dissemination and reception.

In the performative imaginations of Artaud and Wolman, sound is movement that comes before language. Sound displaces air particles and therefore has a physical presence, an active movement within the space. In this sense, sound operates much more like gesture than like speech, at least as it is typically constructed. It is here that Artaud’s study of Balinese theater intersects with Wolman’s readings on the same topic: Artaud interpreted these synthetic theaters as totalities in which “language, based on signs and no longer on words, is liberated.”²³ This form of vocalization — which for Artaud sounds something like cries and screams and traces of speech, but for Wolman sounds more like breath — acts somewhere between gesture and thought.²⁴ For Wolman, this “gesture” aligns with procedures of interruption, of cutting, overlaying and blotting out, splitting. Something like “thought” aligns more closely with Wolman’s sound poetics that refuses speech, or to coalesce a particular meaning or set of relations. In both cases, Wolman favors the more unstable associations that arise in response to and in spite of the disjuncture.

By the late 1970s, around the time he created Wolman et son double, Wolman was exploring tactics of separation and juxtaposition in visual as well as sculptural formats: he cut up postcards, photographs, book pages, or found material to create collaged canvases, and he took mass-produced female mannequins and cut them down the middle, cleaving their bodies in two even as he protected the relation of the whole, their faces symmetrically divided between the brow, along the ridge of the nose, over the central swoop of the lips, and through the middle cleft of the chin. (Figure 3) The body is still presented to the viewer as complete, but not whole. One cannot avoid the fissure of empty space that separates and doubles what previously had been a single form. The mannequin is already a double of the live body.

In these so-called “separatist” works, Wolman observed that he sought to “create a space on a surface affected by boundaries.”²⁵ The creation of a form — a body, a space of encounter — is only possible in relation to the boundary that circumscribes it. Much more could be said about these unsettling separatist works, but in the context of Wolman’s mégapneumes, I propose that we think about the relation between the muscular intimacy of the breath, the mediated but embodied voice of (a) subject(s) on the recording, and the listener in the mégapneumes in a similar vein to the creation of affect vis-à-vis the negotiations of proximity and distance, subjectivity and forms of sociability, separation and limits.

In a free verse poem that Wolman drafted a few years later, he seems to reflect on these sculptural interventions which he had made with the mannequins. Surprisingly, he invokes the separated body not in terms of a vertical cut as one might expect, but rather as cyclical in nature:

separate the body
eruption of the body, up until now incorruptible and whole
closed body in the circle of the body
where the body begins where the body ends
[…]
see in the separation of the body
see in the space separating the body
see the difference of the body newly formed
see nothing but that
see in the separation of the body
see a space allowing light to pass through
see nothing but that
see in the separation of the body
the difference
this space of light coming from the body
body came from the body
see this space
[…]
the body-to-body of reconstituted bodies
see nothing but the relation surmounting the edges
do not see the limits
enclose the limits
enclose the limits that enclose the unlimited space
liberate light
liberate space
liberate the day
liberate the light of the space of the day
liberate the days of the separation of the body”²⁶

Cyclical time and movement is implicit in his reference to “the day,” which is mirrored in the circuit of a closed system (“closed body in the circle of the body”). Yet this closed system is implicated in a network of relations (“the body-to-body…”). The act of enclosing constrains but also allows the act of opening. The body is a closed circle, but a circle within a circle.

Wolman’s sound poems extend this same logic of enclosure and liberation. The impression of Wolman’s breath and body noises right in our ears — perhaps even threatening to overtake the pace of our own breathing — produces a conflicting sense of intimacy and alterity. We become the mégapneumie even as we may feel repulsed, startled, or alienated by it. Before I can be in relation to others, I must accept that I am only myself insofar as I am unfixed, fleeting, wholly known and yet still strange.

In La Mémoire, the function of memory is both singular and heterogeneous, a closed circuit that is also open to change, distortion, and re-inscription, whether intentional or not. We hear and feel this unspooling process in La Mémoire as we are encroached upon by the artist’s singular breath, that might also be anyone’s breath, or our own breathing, made strange through amplification, distortion, projection, and delay. Not so unlike the act of remembering –– particularly remembering past versions of oneself, that may so often feel both familiar and synchronous, or strange and detached. La Mémoire performs memory as a doubling of intimacy and alterity, in turn forming the unfixed and peculiar subjectivity that Wolman’s work embodies. The voice in Wolman’s mégapneumes is that of a self that is proximate to the present and, in the same breath, proximate to an other of the past. Rather than performing memory narratively, Wolman constructs this oscillation between the intimate and the strange –– between the subject herself and oneself in relation to others –– through the visceral facture of the breath.

La Mémoire and Wolman et son double make us viscerally feel the process of breathing: the predictable yet astonishing and idiosyncratic embodied rhythms of inhalation and exhalation. We hear, feel, and see a “closed body” that is simultaneously a “body-to-body” –– always in relation to an other, perhaps the strangeness of one’s own self, or the proximate presence of an implied other who is felt, even if not explicitly heard or seen. Just as the “strike” (grève) invoked in Wolman et son double incapacitates in order to demand and enable new ways of making and relating, so too Wolman’s sound poems strike at how we understand expression and selfhood in order to make visible — through an act of haptic listening rather than looking, mediated by recording technology — other models of subjectivity.