Story of Another Soul
A decolonial dreaming of new futures that seeks truth in the roots of improvisation
Legendary Meanjin based spoken word poet Huda Fadlelmawla and award winning Naarm based musician Reuben Lewis combine forces in Story of Another Soul, out now via Life Before Man. Huda delivers powerful spoken word poetry about equality, her journey as a Sudanese refugee and women’s rights. Reuben devises an ever expanding and “vivid listening experience that gleams with sinister detail” (The Wire). Together, they create a new narrative, one that is just between us the listener, the poet and the sound world.
There is a vast, monolithic intensity to this collaboration. It plays on expectations, shattering all semblance of familiar form, story and symbol. Huda’s poems are messages and prayers that oscillate between past and future, jostling conflict into harmony and back again. They bleed, they cry, they celebrate. Reuben’s role is that of sorcerer, creating backdrops and soundscapes, permitting these poems to breathe. Trumpet, pedals, samplers, loops, all combine to forge otherness and mystery, all-the-while mimicking the delicate thrum of the heart, its tranquil rhythms.
Everything is twinned. Hope co-exists with its shadowy underside, love flourishes with pain. Reuben’s electronic score bathes Huda’s words in a warm sonic glow; his ambient and otherworldly textures provide shelter, the promise of calm, solace, and reassurance.
Reuben Lewis:
This was a magic collaboration right from the very first breath. I met Huda in person for the first time in the studio on the recording day for this album. I had prepared a few sketches and soundscapes, not knowing exactly what would work best in the moment. I set up a mic, pressed record, then watched on in awe as she delivered line after line of pure improvised perfection in response to my music. What you hear on this record barely scratches the surface of what was captured in that first meeting.
The overarching themes and ideas for this project grew organically from the process itself. Huda and I are both improvisers and developed this collaboration from that core practice. From that perspective, the connecting themes are both timeless and timely. Huda is a powerful artist and activist with a story to tell and love to give, but like many women of colour in this space, her position at the coalface of trauma carries a heavy burden that she grapples with through her art. Within my practice as a performer, composer, sound designer and improviser, I’ve increasingly become interested in the concept of holding space. As we began recording and I started to hear Huda respond to my music, I realised that this work was going to be a deep exploration of that idea for me.
Tariro Mavondo:
Black women we are hyper sensitive to the injustices of other people. Often we have the capacity to hold space for others but just because we can doesn’t mean we always should. This is the result of Western European epistemological, ontological and axiological civilisation that has cornered us into this shape, this form of hyper vigilance.
In Story of Another Soul Huda the Goddess proclaims she is retiring from this role and it is a powerful act of resistance, disruption and liberation. The hanging up the boots of martyrdom is a very important process because it is the journey of self love, self respect and self knowing.
The conviction and oral dexterity that this wordsmith utters these truth through poetry is deliciously generous and wonderfully showcases her mastery of spoken word. Reuben Lewis’s music is the perfect soundtrack to enter into Huda’s mindscape and interiority of expansive themes, deep as the ocean, and longitudinal like stretches of endless desert.
Story of Another Soul is an irresistible and unforgettable album for its irrefutable honesty. It is a profound offering into the poetics of presence and stillness. Inviting the audience to be and to feel moved by the world seen and unseen and to in the spirit of reciprocity move the world from a place of cup overflowing where one’s wellbeing is prioritised first.
The album is a decolonial dreaming of new futures and we get a sense that this exercise is far from futile that it is indeed a necessity for our very existence. It is the love letter, the love dedication to humanity we so needed in these times.
Liner notes by Des Cowley:
Words and music. It was September 2017, and I was in London. I remember taking the #34 bus from Hackney, across town, to see the Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition Boom for Real, at the Barbican. The exhibition chronicled Jean-Michel’s associations with Warhol, Keith Haring, Blondie, and the whole early ‘80s No Wave scene at the Mudd Club in New York. But my eye was constantly roaming his canvases, picking up on jazz references: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Ornithology, Kokosolo. Basquiat was making gestures, name-checking his forbears, like a rapper improvising in word and paint.
Afterwards, I wandered through the exhibition gift shop, which proved a washout. But I came away with a book entitled Jazz Poems, one of those little Everyman pocket editions. On the front cover, was a moody, black & white portrait of John Coltrane, looking straight to camera, his sax resting on his lap. The book contained over a hundred poems by poets celebrating or eulogizing this music, some obvious, others surprising: Langston Hughes, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Notozaki Shange, Ted Joans, Amiri Baraka, Frank O’Hara, Thulani Davis. There were numerous poems for and about Billie Holiday, but also Dolphy, Thelonious, Buddy Bolden, Duke, Ornette, Sun Ra, Miles, Sonny, Lester, Bird, and of course ‘Trane. Turning to page 237, I came across Frank O’Hara’s The Day Lady Died: “she whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”. It brings you up short.
Jazz Poems contains poems about jazz but also poems that are jazz, like Hayden Caruth’s The Fantastic Names of Jazz, which is nothing but a list of names – Cootie Williams, Cab Calloway / Lockjaw Davis, Chippie Hill spoken rat-a-tat-tat. These poems are meant for the ear, for the rhythms of the body. They are intended as performative, spoken riffs, their words hinged on melodies and chords, freely improvised. Sure, Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels can be read on the page, but it can also be spoken aloud: his words turning to energy turning to music, dancing through smoke-filled rooms, fueled by insistent bass grooves, caught on tape: wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming on the cash register and everything is going to the beat. Think Jeanne Lee with Jimmy Lyons; Brion Gysin and Steve Lacy; Amiri Baraka with David Murray; Maria Parks with Albert Ayler; Jayne Cortez with the Firesplitters.
Huda Fadlelmawla and Reuben Lewis’s Story of Another Soul exists in dialogue with these poets and musicians, building on tradition, but equally striking out into new territory, their improvisatory cadences existing in the here and now.
Reuben Lewis is no stranger to working with poets, having previously collaborated with Tariro Mavondo on the Australian Art Orchestra’s Closed Beginnings; and with Didem Caia on I Hold the Lion’s Paw single This Body is a Compass. Since re-locating from Canberra to Melbourne, he has staked his claim as one of the city’s finest improvisers and creative musicians, leading his own ensemble, while contributing his unique sound to others. He’s performed in concert halls and artist-run spaces, collaborated with dance projects, here and overseas, and with theatre works. Everywhere, he can be seen crossing boundaries, crossing space.
Of late, he’s been exploring solo performance, an unearthly mix of trumpet and electronics, producing music made from scraps and slivers, heavily-layered, full of ambient textures, brooding and near-glacial in feel. Manifesting itself as slow music, these sounds unfold in real time, an array of improvised patterns fabricated from reverb and silence. Listening to it, you get the feeling he’s spinning stories, making up narratives, toying with strange ambiguity, mysterious and open-ended.
Huda Fadlelmawla, who performs as Huda the Goddess, is an Australian Poetry Slam Champion, and two times Queensland champion. She’s a spoken word poet, educator, dancer, mental health advocate. She speaks from the heart, declamatory and incandescent, sharing stories of herself and her ancestors, transmuting the everyday into the unfamiliar, turning lived experience into art. Her poems are rhythmic dances, burnished and glowering, that arise out of air, restoring poetry to its spoken roots.
Together Huda and Reuben meld words and sounds into new configurations, neither poem nor music, but something else. Fields of electronic pulse and trumpet loops serve to buttress a voice that speaks: all I know is who I am at this very moment and how I feel in this very second. A poetry that foregrounds instantaneity, that seeks truth in the roots of improvisation, holding faith in the ephemeral.
Sometimes your purpose is to serve the world with honesty. Huda’s poems are messages and prayers that oscillate between past and future, jostling conflict into harmony and back again. They bleed, they cry, they celebrate. I have too many scars in my bones. The poem That Hollow Wind calls forth her grandmother, a ghostly presence drawn back from a time when hopes and dreams were just facts to me. Her grandmother resides in memory and breath and legacy and shelter, summoned anew: I go to the ocean and I look to the sky and I swear to you her breath was collected in a jar thrown to the sky and that is how the first cloud was birthed.
Reuben’s role is that of sorcerer, creating backdrops and soundscapes, permitting these poems to breathe. Trumpet, pedals, samplers, loops, all combine to forge otherness and mystery, all-the-while mimicking the delicate thrum of the heart, its tranquil rhythms. By way of example: Huda’s poem The Type of Love. An eleven-minute tour de force, a recitation overflowing with tenderness, pain, questions, beginnings, endings: even in the midst of a storm lightening is a reminder that darkness is not meant to last forever. Everything is twinned. Hope co-exists with its shadowy underside, love flourishes with pain. Reuben’s electronic score bathes Huda’s words in a warm sonic glow; his ambient and otherworldly textures provide shelter, the promise of calm, solace, and reassurance.
By the album’s end, it feels like we’re a long way from my Everyman book of Jazz Poems. But like Frank’s The Day Lady Died, it brings you up short. Huda Fadlelmawla’s poems and Reuben Lewis’s finely-etched soundscapes dig deep, mining the dark recesses of the heart. Together they speak, in words and music, so that our heartbeats can be the drum.
Credits
Release: May 17, 2024
Huda Fadlelmawla — spoken word poetry
Reuben Lewis — composition, trumpet, synthesisers, pedals, electronics
Recorded, mixed & produced by Reuben Lewis
Mastered by Helmut Erler
Liner Notes by Des Cowley and Tariro Mavondo
Artwork and design by Phil Day
Distributed by Gazebo Books
This recording was made possible thanks to the Australian Music Centre MOMENTUM Commissions with support provided by Hendrik Prins, and Life Before Man with support provided by Anthony Mark Day.
Huda and Reuben acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which this album was created, the Jagera people and the Turrbal people of Meanjin, and the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of Naarm, and pay their respect to Elders past and present.
