On Connection

by Kae Tempest

Brand New Ancients was a seventy-five-minute-long poem that I told in theatres, scored for a quartet of drums and electronics, violin, cello and tuba. I wrote the poem over a period of many months, in week-long bursts of intense creativity, and once it was finished and on its feet touring, I saw first-hand that there were things Tempest-the-writer never knew about the writing that Tempest-the-reader discovered each night with increasing clarity. Themes emerged to me, the reader, once I had committed the text to my body and was delivering it to rooms of people. Patterns to the language that I hadn’t been aware of when I was writing. Patterns between characters. I noticed links that helped me intuit meaning and remember the text, because they gave me a sense of why one passage led to another, but I have to say I was not aware of these links in the same way when I was writing. I have found this to be the case with every work I’ve toured since then. The reader undergoes a process of discovery that the writer side of myself is not involved in. This is why I made the decision to record my most recent album, The Book of Traps and Lessons, in one take, after committing it to memory. To try to get as close to that process of discovery as I could. It wasn’t only about the words themselves, but how the words spoken in sequence at the right depth of feeling became bridges between emotion and experience. Between audience and stage, between venue and crowd. Between the day that everyone...