Features
Marshelle Haseley
Considered one in all the leading Caribbean writers of his generation, Anthony Joseph, a Trinidad and Tobago-born creator based within the UK, is equally celebrated for his poetry and music as for his fiction.
His work is featured in a new online project produced by UK literary organisation Renaissance One, Speaking Volumes and hosted by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest. The production brings his novel The Frequency of Magic to life online through musical performance, with a series of 100 each day podcast episodes which premiered on October 25.
The audio series is the most recent collaboration between Speaking Volumes – a London-based live literature organisation specialising in getting underrepresented voices heard, reaching diverse audiences, and finding exciting ways to present the work of writers – and the NGC Bocas Lit Fest.
Bocas, in a release, praised the production as revolutionary and impressive.
The project was funded by Arts Council England and features vocals by the creator, whose latest book, Sonnets for Albert, has been shortlisted for each the Forward Prize and the TS Eliot Prize, the 2 most prestigious British awards for poetry.
Joseph was chosen by Renaissance One and Arts Council England as one in all 50 black and Asian writers to have contributed greatly to contemporary British literature in 2004.
His dramatised readings are accompanied by musicians Denys Baptiste, Andrew John, Thibaut Remy, Colin Webster, Jason Yarde, and Rod Youngs.
Bocas said, “The Frequency of Magic is concurrently a portrait of Trinidad and a portrait of creative obsession, shot through with musical rhythms and cadences. The creator has recorded your complete novel in 100 audio chapters, accompanied by his band, bringing this inventive text alive for the ear.”
Joseph said, “In the summertime of 2021, I went into Love Electric Studios in London with my regular band – musicians I’ve worked with for over a decade. For five days, we improvised and spontaneously created soundscapes and grooves which I read over.
“In the beginning of the week, the duty of recording 100 chapters of 1,000 words each seemed daunting, especially when each chapter lasted around ten minutes! But we found our flow and made it to the tip around 5 pm on Friday evening.”
He said the improvisational but naturally accurate elements of the music, which moves from ambient textures to free jazz, echo each the free-spirited and surrealist modes through which he wrote and edited the text. It was also the approach guiding the novel’s narrative form, by which the whole lot occurs concurrently.
“The spaces where these two elements align is really the frequency of magic.”
The series is being released from 25 October, one episode every day, and continues for 100 days at www.bocaslitfest.com/the-frequency-of-magic.
Listeners can listen each day or binge-listen weekly to catch up in batches on the Bocas Lit Fest website.
