Raymond Antrobus & Evelyn Glennie: a meeting of minds

Dame Evelyn Glennie is a two-time Grammy winner and the world’s premier solo percussionist. Raymond Antrobus is a poet and writer with an MBE, a Ted Hughes Award and a cult following for his debut 2019 collection The Perseverance. That they both happen to be deaf is incidental to Another Noise, an album recorded in a single afternoon at Glennie’s headquarters in Cambridgeshire.

“In all my years of playing, collaborating with a poet is something I’ve never done,” says the Aberdeenshire-born Glennie, 59, who has recorded almost 50 albums and worked with everyone from Björk and Béla Fleck to Bobby McFerrin and film-maker Danny Boyle. “It’s an entirely new approach.”

Featuring 12 short pieces recorded in real time – Glennie fashioned soundscapes that unfolded as Antrobus spoke – Another Noise is testament to the respective artistry of both participants, and to the creative vision of Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Ustad Saami, The Good Ones).

“I’ve always aligned with Ian’s philosophy of seeking music that is under-appreciated and worthy of celebration,” says the Hackney-raised, Margate-based Antrobus, 38, a self-described ‘investigator of missing sounds’ for whom poems are sound objects, containers for the exploration of masculinity, deafness and identity, particularly around his Jamaican-British heritage.

“Ian’s work makes you think twice about perceptions and clichés,” he says of Brennan, whose CV spans over 30 international albums from overlooked regions and groups. “For me as a deaf person, as someone who requires synced-up artificial technology to communicate, I’ve made it a mission to live through a lens of exploration and creativity. This album feels very much connected to that.”

Featuring guest vocals by blind singer and disability activist Precious Perez, album opener ‘The Noise’ was written during lockdown, when Antrobus’ hearing aids stopped working and had to be sent out for repair. “The first day I felt panicky, self-conscious, secluded,” says the poet, whose deafness is medically classified as ‘moderate to severe.’ “But then I started thinking I could try and embrace my natural, unaided sound. I ended up finding a sort of liberation.”

His delivery throughout Another Noise is rhythmic and spacious, serving the energy of the words in the tradition of such famed Black British dub poets as Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah while still sounding thoroughly himself.

‘The thing I liked most about the secondhand noise / was how much it deepened / the sensation of walking through the house,’ he intones, accompanied by Glennie on percussion instruments including timpani drum, on which she placed auxiliary instruments (a metal log drum, string-pulled music boxes) to vary its response, and the waterphone, a type of acoustic idiophone with a cylindrical neck, a resonator bowl able to hold small amounts of water and bronze rods (and multiple harmonics). She manipulated this with sticks, mallets, bows and a set of metal chopsticks.

“The poem is about returning to the unaided ear and the peace to be found within that,” continues Antrobus with a smile. “It felt like a good way to start an album intended as a re-tuning, another way to be in sound, with two deaf people creating that sound. Me and the great Evelyn Glennie, the first famous living deaf person I was made aware of, who is accessible and formidable and real.”

An educator with 29 honorary doctorates and awards including the Polar Music Prize, as well as those Grammys (she’s also been nominated three more times), Glennie puts the creative empathy between herself and Antrobus down to trust.

“It was one of those things where you take a deep breath and just see where it goes,” she says. “We didn’t want it to sound so unbelievably manipulated because Raymond’s voice is so pure. The idea was that improvisation was at the core of this, and if it didn’t work that was fine. I was happy to spend the whole day listening to Raymond recite because he’s so incredible, humble and focused and his poems are utterly amazing.”

Poems were printed out on the day for Glennie to read in advance. “Just to allow me to prepare something, not necessarily which instruments to use, but because it was quite a challenge to lip-read what he was saying and then react. And I wanted to keep everything really compact, instrument-wise.”

Working barefoot to help her feel the music – in her 2003 TED talk ‘How to Truly Listen’, Glennie discusses how she hears music in different parts of her body other than her ears – she reacted to the poems, responding here, generating ideas there, allowing the words to lead the piece with the sensitivity and dignity she brings to all her performances.

“There is space, groundedness and strength in Evelyn’s improvising,” says Berlin-based percussionist/gyil player Bex Burch who, when we talk, is preparing to perform with Glennie in Germany this August. “Collaborating with Evelyn is transformative. Every note she plays feels life-affirming. She is teaching the world that there is more to listening; there’s waiting and staying and excitement and electricity.”

Antrobus agrees. “Evelyn was locked into her world of sound and vibration and percussion and I was locked into my world of words, but there was an instant connection. As soon as we started recording it was like, ‘Oh my God, it feels like we’re floating.’”

You can feel their empathy on tracks such as ‘Signs, Music’, which tells of Antrobus teaching his baby son to sign using the Makaton language programme (“This track is a container for ideas around poetry and music and where language begins”) and ‘Resonance’, a 19-line villanelle and an ode to tolerance and listening. ‘Settling here was not my mission / But wherever I live I live honestly / The birds sound different in this city,’ he states, as Glennie responds with typically inventive flair. “I wouldn’t be able to repeat any of these works, which is great,” she says. “Next time it’ll be another take on it.”

In a world crammed with distracting chatter, Another Noise is a project intended to reclaim noise, to offer another way of listening and, more abstractly, of sensing and seeing. It’s the sound of two artists on a journey that takes them and the listener outside their comfort zone. But it is also a tonic, a pause. “I think people will find something replenishing for the spirit, for the soul,” says Antrobus. “It just takes active, careful listening”.

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue, read the magazine online – subscribe today: magsubscriptions.com