Flarf Orchestra

Author: Drew Gardner

Publisher: Edge Books (2012)

New York City-based multi-instrumentalist and poet Drew Gardner creates wild, spontaneous conductions of improvised music played by indie rock, jazz and classical players and fuses it with the outrageous poetry known as Flarf. Gardner has painstakingly edited this compilation from several live recordings into a suite of music and poetry that goes from post-rock to free jazz to minimalism and back again, with an atmosphere that is mesmerizing and riotous by turns.

Flarf Orchestra is one of several configurations from Gardner's Poetics Orchestra project, dedicated to combining the arts of music and poetry. Gardner's unique card and hand-signal conduction system expands on those used by John Zorn and Butch Morris. The players on Flarf Orchestra include indie rock guitar player Franklin Bruno (from the Mountain Goats) classical piano player John Orfe (from Alarm Will Sound), and jazz players Ehran Elisha, Avram Fefer, and Adam Lane. The nine Flarf poets include writers from all around the US as well as Icelandic writer Eiríkur Örn Nor∂dahl. The Flarf poets use collaged texts gathered from Google search results to create poetry.