Karen Werner’s Covenant of the Tongue is among our most experimental works, arriving at the form of critical practice after having iterated through other expressive registers and personal explorations. It is adapted from a radio piece and a site-specific sound installation; it also has qualities both of choral song and of spoken poetry -- note the way Werner uses mic technique to sensuously explore words we know like “palate,” “teeth” and “lips,” alongside melodious Hebrew letters. And that is not all. The piece also powerfully functions as an audiographic project inflected by auto-ethnographic and critical performance practice methods (on the latter, see Eidsheim 2019). Given the subject matter, it is surely fitting that this version of the work is itself something of a passageway haunted by its antecedents.

Anna Friz writes in her curatorial essay that she wishes she could hear the sound of the empty room where Werner’s audio piece was created, the sonic ground for Covenant of the Tongue. If postmemory is Werner’s mode, spaces and their occupants are her fascination – the Novaragasse house, the Viennese public passageway, particles of air and matter themselves, ghosts. This may serve as a reminder that audiography that draws inspiration from installation needs to reflect upon the situated nature of all theorizing, and the need to be mindful of how critical analysis reverberates and resonates in different spaces and contexts. Werner’s powerful idea of performed utterance as “offering” will surely inspire future audigraphers.

In its use of the voice, Covenant of the Tongue, makes an interesting comparison with Amy Skjerseth’s analysis of Yoko Ono. Both take the semantic and musical forms of the voice to a place of extreme eccentricity as a mode of intervention. For Werner, that involves breaking language down into microscopic particles of speech that she “chisels and engraves” into the air, opening up ethical, poetic and sensuous fields. Where Skjerseth heard a “haptic audio-visuality” in Ono’s vocalizations that facilitated an embodied communication with listeners, Werner’s vocal practice aims at finding a means to communicate with or through the ghosts of the past through these highly articulated particles of sound. Friz points out that sound and radio art are often bound up with the paradox of presence and absence, and this is true both of bodies and of voices. Covenant may belong in the tradition of works exploring the connection between sound and memory, beginning perhaps with spiritualist Sir Oliver Lodge, one of radio’s key inventors, who a hundred years before Werner also sought out a spiritualist medium to help him communicate with a son he lost, and in the process helped to invent the modern concept of ether, forever tying it to radiophonic esoterica (Lodge, 1916).

Work Cited

Eidsheim, Nina. 2019. The Race of Sound. Durham: Duke University Press

Lodge, Oliver. 1916. Raymond, or, Life and Death. New York: George H Doran.