Kiera Mulhern and Sydney Spann’s set at the Stone Circle back in March still stands as one of my favorites of the year. Prior to that, I’d seen both artists perform individually, Mulhern in an installment of Tone Glow’s Quarantine Concerts in 2021 and Spann for the opening of her Cow, Cow, Cow, Rabbit, Recalcitrance, Bunny, Dog, Dog, Dog installation at the Center for Performance Research in 2022. Unsurprisingly, their live collaboration was a direct extension of their respective bodies of work, but it also introduced a more grounded dimension. Imperfect instantaneity; the pushing of pedals; the messy, mercurial forms of base utterance. Their duo project is now known as Iris Our and has issued a lovely recorded debut with Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt, which delves deeper into that earthy realm. Structured, as always, around voice, the short five-track suite roams complex caverns, brushing by patches of “raw pink flesh.” The sense of organic space and blurred ontological boundaries are reminiscent of Mulhern’s marvelous De ossibus 20, but where that record was introspective, Victual is universal, the free-associative conduit between the two poets swelling ever outward. Ensconced in echoing piano and murky electronics, their exchange in “The Columns of Echo’s Lymphatic Library” is a thematic invocation for the CD’s focus on “femininity understood through diffusion”: “the mouth of it / wound / wound / mouth / splits open / wound / mother” (I’m paraphrasing; many of the words are spoken simultaneously). Even with the lush sound-collage instrumentals, much of Victual boils down to just great poetry. “Debris Promise” traces rent threads via rhyme—”torn sheet, or something shorn”—while “Splits and Wants” favors textural over literal meaning with its wordless birdsong chorus. In “Erections of Angels Directed at Me,” their singing (and flute-playing) is defiant light in droning mechanical darkness. Iris Our stand in a rich continuum of subversive feminine poetics encompassing everything from Tender Buttons to Dictee, Katalin Ladik to Asha Sheshadri. Abstract as it is, Victual splits the vortex of horror with a fleeting yet concrete mantra: “weather / together.”
Copies are available from Recital and various distros: Forced Exposure, All Night Flight, Soundohm, etc.
Noise Not Music 