An accompanying musical soundtrack (available on cassette or digitally) will be released in tandem, by Wormwood (Wenaus and composer, soprano, and keyboardist Christina Marie Willatt). You can get the cassette ($10) from Asterism or the cassette + book together (for $20) from the Bandcamp page. If you purchased a book + want a free download code, contact us.
Cover images for both the book and cassette were adapted from the artist book Particulates by Rosaire Appel.
LIBRETTO LUNAVERSITOL: NOTES TOWARDS A GLOTTOGENETIC PROCESS is a work by Andrew C. Wenaus written in patamathematical formulae and International Phonetic Alphabet and is accompanied by 18 biomorphic figures by iconoclastic multimedia artist Kenji Siratori. A xenopoetic musical score and work of optical poetry that looks to the Zaum experiments of Velemir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh, the book speculates on a sudden emergence of a super-hybrid technical language autopoietically organizing itself into existence outside the experience, knowledge, or access of humans. In this sense, the book can be thought of as an extended analogue to or visualization of the ways autonomous informational processes optimize themselves in the black box of big data in ways that we cannot understand without undergoing similar emergent transformations ourselves. Steadfastly opposed to purity and essentialism, the book calls for the entirety of time and space and its attendant objects, processes, and concepts to parasitize literature and poetry. From this super-hybridity will ultimately emerge the song of Zaum, the language of the stars, the technical word as such, that is, universal emancipation.
A very playful work. Visually beautiful and giving me loads of inspiration both for vocalizing and for devising compositional structures.
— Jaap Blonk, author of AsemiQuads
At times, Libretto Lunaversitol: Notes Towards a Glottogenetic Process reminds me of the abstract science fiction of Chris Marker, and of a time when the future still remained to be invented rather than endlessly simulated. However, it is the furthest from nostalgia that it is possible to be. Wenaus’ estranged, elusive text, mostly written in the asemic and syntactic language of Zaum, are layered over the unbounded geometries and biomorphs breeding under Siratori’s intricate, graceful designs. They do not speak but imply the effectuation of a textual existence with its own libidinal excesses, a dreamwork beyond the scope of psychoanalysis. It’s a futurist document for an ‘advanced condition of time’ whose horizon seem to be shrinking to the dot on a depowered cathode tube, its depths figural rather than semantic; or a prospectus for our digital afterlives as they collude in the re-enchantment of the Virgo Cluster.
—David Roden, author of Posthuman Life and Xenoerotics
Libretto Lunaversitol: Notes Towards a Glottogenetic Process is an extraplanetary galaktikós, replete with mutants and a dēnsior’s alien code in patamathematical zaum. In this demonopoly as international phonetic alphabet, Wenaus and Siratori have sculpted a cuuaṇtic encryption key seeking to be deciphered by teams of future kubernḗtists.
—Daniel Y. Harris, author of The Posthuman Series (Volume I-VI)
There are machines which kill and there are machines which sing. But also, there are machines which are especially designed to spark hallucinations in the human soul through configurations—words, images, accents and things of which worlds are generally made. Such configurations otherwise known as poems or objects of an expansive building are machines which have one task only: to marshal a compressed but dreadful assault on the human psyche—an assault of which Andrew C. Wenaus’s Libretto Lunaversitol: Notes Towards a Glottogeneitc Process is a fine example. —Reza Negarestani, author of Cyclonopedia and Intelligence and Spirit
The sewage of language, the sewage of symbology, the sewage of comprehension. The wreck of today, the erosion of tomorrow. New births of oily blood. Phantom is. The blasphemy of structure, the heresy of format. A prayer in an undiscovered language. Black hole buckshot to the guts. An angel’s face. The ruins, the ruins, the ruins.
-B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space
The text in Libretto Lunaversitol must be experienced—in the fullest sense of the term—while listening to the musical score provided by Andrew C. Wenaus and composer, soprano, and keyboardist Christina Marie Willatt. Willatt’s fragmented and ethereal vocal “sounds” reverberate in and out of reverberating electronic textures that musically reproduce the three-dimensionality of the visual and written texts. The immersive music that accompanies the poetic-phonetic texts are a true “Gesamtkunstwerk.”
—Edward J. Matthews, author of Guy Debord’s Politics of Communication
