Sudden Wealth - Under Gemini Sudden Wealth

Sudden Wealth was founded by Chris Evans (Life Without Buildings) in 2022 as a collaboration with Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Graham Kelly and invited poets and artists who use the spoken word as a central element of their work. The project considers how the flux of subjectivity within language might be shaped and reimagined through a triangulation of written composition, vocal intonation and extrinsic sound.

Under Gemini is a new twelve-inch record by Sudden Wealth with Jason Dodge, based on Noelle Kocot’s extraordinary two-volume poem of the same name. First published in 2020 by FIVEHUNDREDPLACES, the poetry press founded by Dodge in 2012, Under Gemini was issued in a single edition of 500 copies. The poem’s movement between intimacy and estrangement lends itself to Sudden Wealth’s distinctive approach to spoken language and sound. Recorded live on the Danish island of Møn, the record places Dodge’s reading of Kocot’s words within an arrangement of bass, guitar and electronic composition, allowing the text to emerge not simply as recitation but as a volatile acoustic event. Voice, language and instrumentation repeatedly converge and separate: the poem is carried by Dodge’s intonation while being interrupted, agitated and expanded by sounds that appear to gather around it.

For Under Gemini, Dodge is joined by Evans on bass, Halvorsen on electronics and Kelly on guitar. Arranged and mixed by Evans and Halvorsen, and mastered by Halvorsen, the two extended tracks do not illustrate Kocot’s poem or provide it with a conventional musical accompaniment. Instead, they establish a shifting environment in which speech is exposed to rhythm, duration, repetition and interference. The recording draws attention to the space between the fixity of publication and the singular, time-bound event of a voice speaking.