Jointly released by Compost and Height and Organized Music from Thessaloniki
t21
numbered paperback edition of 120 copies
sold out
“This book is written to be read out loud and outside” Patrick Farmer
Compost and Height and Organized Music from Thessaloniki are pleased to announce the joint publication of try i bark, Patrick Farmer’s first book of prose.
Limited to an edition of 120, try i bark is the direct result of Farmer’s time spent in the Estonian parish of Mooste, where he was MOKS artist-in-residence during the summer of 2011.
Having undertaken the residency with the intention of making field recordings, Farmer found his response to the environment generating a body of writing. The work explores what he describes as the “delicateness of interpretation, of knowing one’s own [response] and how easy it is to misplace”. As well as capturing something of his encounter with the landscape, try i bark also questions the authorship of this encounter, posing questions as to how our experience, both internal and external, affects our reception of an object, event or situation.
Farmer’s observation that “silence is louder the moment one begins to listen” no doubt contributed to his decision to respond through text rather than microphones and recording devices. This strategy ties in with his wider conception of field recording, which he describes as having connections with Charles Olson’s ‘projective verse’, Roland Barthes’ ‘extreme disparity of structure’ and William Carlos Williams’ ‘variable foot’. During the composition of try i bark Farmer suggested he was often “unaware of what [he] was doing” yet proceeded intuitively finding that the “teeth of silver birch, the pine needles, the yawning cats, collapsed structures and wild boar all became shapes in the book”.
Since it was first written in July 2011, the text which now comprises try i bark has taken many forms. This includes a series of large scrolls exhibited alongside the work of Manfred Werder and Ben Owen in New Works, an exhibition curated by Compost and Height and shown at the Old Fire Station, Oxford as part of the Audiograft Festival 2012.
