FIREBIRD

Firebird is a full-length album of spoken voice and experimental music by Kythe Heller (text and voice) and duo Sounds Like Things: Andrew Stauffer (composition and percussion), and Nicholas Denton Protsack (composition and cello). The work, a realization of Heller’s Massachusetts Book Award-nominated poetry collection, Firebird (Arrowsmith Press), draws from a vast array of sonic resources that include spoken verse, vocalizations, cello, pitched and unpitched percussion, hammer dulcimer, bells, found objects (including boiling water, gardening gloves, fire, and snow), and field recordings. This sonic world probes the capacity of the human spirit to endure under extreme conditions. Here, fire is both a destructive and a unifying force, altering people and landscapes. Runaways, the sick and the poor, a forest and a smoldering mattress—these stunning images burn themselves into the listener’s imagination. The female body becomes the site of trauma and myth, a place where “everything is burning, has been and is always burning.”

Instrumental tracks mastered and vocals recorded at Bop Stop Studios in Boston, MA.

Mattress Under the Overpass

Kythe Heller is an award-winning poet, artist, and scholar whose work spans text, film, music, performance, and multimedia social practice. Initially trained as a writer, Heller has pursued a range of work which explores language, myth, technology, and community as sites of human florescence. Recently nominated for a 2020 Massachusetts Book Award for her poetry collection Firebird, her work was described by poet Fanny Howe as containing “…a real human who experiences the fire of the divine that hurts and saves. Maybe only once in a lifetime and only spoken in poetry like this.”

As a writer, Kythe is the author of Firebird (Arrowsmith), two poetry chapbooks, Immolation (Monk Honey) and Thunder (Wick: Harvard Divinity School), and critical studies in White Light:Culture, Media, Politics (Cambridge University Press) and Quo Anima: Innovation and Spirituality in Contemporary Poetry (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics). She has received fellowships and grant awards from The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Film, performance, and installation work has been screened and exhibited in the US and Canada.

Currently, Kythe is completing a doctorate at Harvard University in Comparative Religion, with a secondary field in Art, Film, and Visual Studies / Critical Media Practice. She is also the founder and creative director of Vision Lab, a global art and research collective, the editor of Forecast Journal, and a poet on the faculty of Bard College’s Language and Thinking Program.

Mattress Under the Overpass (single) is a short experimental film directed, written, performed, and produced by Kythe Heller, edited by Grace Jackson, music by Andrew Stauffer and Nicholas Denton Protsack, cinematography and co-production by Lise King, and audio engineering by George Trksak. The film enacts a ritual burning from the Firebird poems.