alchemy of sound

tUnE-YaRdS' Merrill Garbus on sounds and lyrics....

On the other hand, I believe in a magic that happens in sound. When you go back to how language was originally formed, I really do think that a lot of it must have had to do with sound and which sounds sounded like the thing you were talking about. I tend to rely heavily on that kind of alchemy, where if I just start with a sound, then the right words will appear, and that something – if you wrote it out in a sentence would be nonsense – evokes far more to people than a more correct sounding sentence.

That’s no revolutionary idea on my part, but sound is my way of accessing that magical abstract language that can hit me in poets like Cummings or Joyce. People who are writing in a channeled kind of way. Gertrude Stein. You sort of go, “what??” but something about it really hits you as a human, the way the words are put together, the choice of words.

 The rest of the interview can be found at The Rumpus. Here's a link.