Finnegans Wake Revisited

Project

4 May 2017

This recording from Usurp’s Conspirators of Pleasure features Annette Perry (voice) and Simon Underwood & Poulomi Desai (sound design). It forms part of an ongoing project setting James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to music.

Our first contribution to this project can be listened to here:
http://127.0.0.1/www.usurp.org.uk/project/usurp-meets-james-joyce/

Finnegans Wake – page 163 line 8 to page 165 line 7
Please listen on headphones or a system with good bass.

This year’s release featuring over 100 musicians and readers from 15 different countries is unique in that contributors are now focused on shorter passages of the book – a page, or a few pages. As always, they create a work that is simultaneously an audio-book as well as a musical adaptation.

Our first contribution to this project:
Finnegans Wake – Book 3 Chapter 4

The ‘Waywords and Meansigns’ as a project has been active since 2015.

The idea was a simple enough question. How many ways are there to read James Joyce’s great and bizarre novel Finnegans Wake?

“To answer this question, we gathered a host of musicians and writers, artists and scholars, weirdos and generally adventurous people. We decided to set the book to music, creating something that is simultaneously an audiobook as well as musical adaptation.

Not wanting to to create a mere homage to Finnegans Wake, we set the entire book to music. We did it once, all 628 pages, and then did it again with a whole new cast of musicians and readers..”