An unauthorized translation of "12! ein Zahlengedicht" by Gerhard Rühm. Recorded at Another Country Bookstore, Berlin, July 6, 2014.

12! A Number Poem by Gerhard Rühm at Another Country, Berlin

Overture to a long collage of tongue twisters. 2011.

Overture To WARMUP

Live at the opening of the exhibition "If Elvis Presley was the King, who was James Brown?" August 28, 2014

Live at San Francisco State University

Selections from WARMUP (2011) performed in LA at the Poetic Research Bureau's Off-Site reading on January 16, 2015.

Selections from WARMUP (2011) -- Live in LA -- Poetic Research Bureau's Offsite Reading -- 1/16/15

A selection from WARMUP, a long collage of tongue twisters. Recorded by Mathew Timmons and Ben White for The People, a radio show on KCHUNG, Los Angeles. Listen to the full show here:  https://soundcloud.com/insertblanc/the-people-tom-comitta-suzanne-stein-ep-27

WARMUP

Horses, Catfish, Cuttlefish

A reading from the desert chapter of The Nature Book (working title), my collage-novel-in-progress. To write this novel, I collect nature descriptions from hundreds of novels and collage them into one nature novel.

This reading took place at Ace Hotel Palm Springs and was a collaboration between Desert X, a new biennial in Palm Springs, CA, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The Nature Book, Chapter 12 at Desert X Biennal, Palm Springs

Recorded live at the Poetic Research Bureau, Los Angeles, March 23, 2018. Recording by Pauline Gloss. Sound editing by Tom Comitta.

The Nature Book is my novel-in-progress that collages together nature descriptions from hundreds of canonical novels. Oscillating between narrative and archive, lyrical excess and data analysis, this book explores ways that nature has buttressed human drama since the beginnings of the novel.

The Nature Book, Part 4: The Endless Summer, Chapter 4

Video version here: https://vimeo.com/229935359

Bill: The Musikill is a multimedia contemporary musical, a collaboration between Los Angeles-based sound poet Tom Comitta and Minneapolis performance duo Fire Drill. Set in a dystopian, post-climate disaster, San Francisco tech commune, the work deploys jingles and earworms to examine corporate culture’s appropriation of leftist aesthetics. The choreography demands extreme exertion from the performers, exposing the body’s inability to sustain the increasing demands on affective labor—and ultimately allowing the musical form to exhaust itself.

Libretto by Tom Comitta
Choreography by Fire Drill
Performed by Tom Comitta, Emily Gastineau, Samantha Johns, Margaret Johnson, Pedro Pablo Lander, Holo Lue Choy, Genevieve Muench, Billy Mullaney, Tim Rehborg, Jeffrey Wells, and Maggie Zepp

Bill: The Musikill, Closing Night at the Momentum Dance Festival, Minneapolis, July 15, 2017

The communist techno sound poetry album you've been waiting for:::

All words by Bertolt Brecht. All voice by Congressman Robert Stripling as he interrogated Brecht during a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in 1947. 

Source: https://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/brecht_bertolt/tondokumente/08_Bertolt-Brecht_Ausschuss-fur-unamerikanische-Bettigung.mp3

Tom Comitta

Popular tracks