During my trip to Essen last weekend, a friend brought me to the Folkwang Museum, which I actually quite enjoyed. It was there that I first encountered his Lyrics project; honestly, it’s something I should have known about a long time ago, but it had somehow stayed off my radar until then. I could try to explain it myself, but his site puts it best:

Since 2004 Saâdane Afif has been asking his friends — usually artists, writers or critics — to write lyrics inspired by his artworks. This simple experiment rapidly turned into something with a greater importance. The texts not only question the notion of interpretation and commentary on a piece of art; they have also become a fundamental material of Afif’s artistic practice.

In the contexts of his exhibitions, Saâdane Afif gave these texts to different musicians. Their musical interpretations offer various mutations of the original ideas from which the artworks arose.

Lyrics Records is Saâdane Afif’s own label, which acts as an archive of this very process.

[Explore more at Lyrics Records]

Now, I’ve got a copy of Paroles (Songbook) right here on my desk, waiting for me to dive in. It’s a collection of 191 texts, the majority of which, if I’m not mistaken, have never actually been set to music. Just flipping through the pages, I’m seeing a plethora of "found" language, constant experimentation with form, and a radical defiance of traditional genres. Simultaneously, the majority of these lyrics appear to carry actual meaning; this is not a collection of deliberate nonsense.

It will likely take me a few months to fully process the whole thing, but the main question for me is what kind of music these words will invite in my mind. I’ve spent time with printed lyrics in the past – The Beatles and Queen when I was younger, and more recently, Bryan Ferry and Michael Gira. The difference there, of course, was that the melodies were already playing in my head, and I didn’t need to strain my imagination.

Will I identify any cracks in the poetic tissue for music to fall through? Will the sounds and rhythms of the language itself start to suggest specific melodies? There’s a risk that the printed word will be too rigid, causing my eyes to simply scan the page without ever actually enticing my imagination. Or, what's even more likely, my eyes have become so accustomed to skimming over text without understanding it that I'll be met with nothing but silence. Beyond that, I frequently listen to music that’s so fucked up that any fixed link between the lyrics and the sound has been severed in my mind, and any words could be paired with any music.

What I plan to try, however, is reading a selection of these texts for three to five minutes each – roughly the length of a standard song. That is significantly longer than the thirty seconds it would normally take to read them. My hope is that by applying this constraint, I might start something interesting.

I’ll keep you posted.