Stephen Vitiello & Edwin Torres - sublingual infinities (2025)

From Edwin Torres...

To a voice trying to find its location, words might seem like ancient artifacts gathering symbology. To my ears, disintegrating parallels of distance and sound are where new languages can set root, new seed songs for an infinite entanglement between poetry and sound.

Stephen Vitiello and I began our collaboration by finding our own parallels between each other's fragments, attempting to expand a listening between planes of cognition and approach. Our initial mission; an integration of wordscape into soundscape as form and destination at once.

There are torqued revelations out of sound's movement through the sensory that re-situates the body as a spatial dimension just under the surface. A specific continuity where poetry's alignment with language creates an asymptotic linearity, an assortment of almost-realms that never quite meet yet pulse each other, between the ears.

This project evolved through a range of creative processes; on most of the tracks the vocals were recorded separately at Stephen's studio, with music and sound added afterwards, using the text as inspiration. On other tracks, rhythm and melody were formed out of vocal utterances that I sent as audio snippets, which were then processed, layered and at times, transformed during the mix.

Two pieces, "travels in the not seeing world" and "the boy made of glass," were recorded at Laurel Road Studios in NYC with the singer Samita Sinha, who also played a one-stringed ektara. The files were then sent to Stephen to be further transformed.

The track "georgiana" is an homage to the poet and linguist Georgiana Peacher, using combinations of text from her book-poem, "Mary Stuart's Ravishment Descending Time," with her Joycean language buried under my distant phonetic accents, propelling the composition.

A unique aspect of these collaborations is that we shift in and out of the voice being primary, and sometimes allow it to be the source, with the processing still driven by the language. The call and response between voice and what propels it through the music creates an ongoing narrative between sublingual perspectives.