Reader John Selogy wrote:
"I work in software marketing which can be maddening but creative at the same time. I live in San Jose and produce abstract, completely unsaleable electronic music when I’m not working.
The other day I was editing a copy of T.S. Eliot reading Prufrock in a track of Adobe audition which also had the Portishead loop in the track below (previously unrelated). But then I just kept looping the Portishead loop and it seemed to fit together so naturally. I simply looped a very tiny piece of "Sour Times" by Portishead and let T.S. Eliot find the tempo and rhythm. I just wanted to share it with others online. It seems like Eliot is aware of the tempo and rhythms at times – creepy."
Check out John’s poetry / music synthesis here.
(Note to John: Please read A.B. right here and not through the Google Reader :-)
Accidental Blogger 
One response to “Reading Prufrock over “Sour Times””
This is a mash-up of tremendous richness! But of course Eliot is “aware of the tempo and rhythms”! Perhaps we tend to foreground his semantic and figural weirdness when we consider his work, but he was wholly a poet, for whom tempo, sound, and rhythm, as well as lexical meaning, were essential components of his art.
This also points out the essence of rock ‘n’ roll (Portishead being as much a rock band as Motorhead, although my preferences lean toward the latter). We should know by now that rock music is not “about” rebellion or drugs or adolescent freedom or fun or toughness. It’s about repetition, and that’s that. One of the finest rock bands of all time, The Fall, even performed an eponymous tribute to repetition, which may very well be the finest rock song of all time, says me.
So juxtaposing Eliot and a loop of Portishead points out not merely the surprising fit of one for the other, but also their utter distinction. There is no drama whatsoever to the loop. On and on it goes, hypnotizing the listener, but anchoring the experience of hearing a disembodied Eliot intoning his poem, which deploys a more ironic yet subtle inflection of repetition in, for example, the repeated lines about women and Michelangelo. The poem develops, the loop does not. The poem can be revisited and enjoyed over and over; the loop allows nothing but a concentrated experience of “over and over.” It’s sublime.
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