Ursula K. Le Guin's Remarkable Electronica Album

Electronic music scholar Geeta Dayal contributes a welcome assessment of science fiction author and poet Ursula K. Le Guin's 1980s foray into electronica, Music and Poetry of the Kesh, to the pages of The Guardian's music section. Le Guin made the album in collaboration with electronic musician/composer Todd Barton. It's "an essential sonic companion to [Le Guin's] book" Always Coming Home, Dayal writes, and "one of Le Guin’s most fascinating and underrated works: a sprawling exploration of a fictional people known as the Kesh, who lived in northern California hundreds of years in the future." Let's pick up with her analysis starting there: 

The book was a novel, a scrapbook and an imaginary anthropological study in one; it was crammed with maps, stories, songs, recipes, poetry, charts and language guides. A bounty of hand-drawn, rustic illustrations by Margaret Chodos-Irvine filled out the volume, with early editions sold packaged with a cassette tape of the album.

The album wasn’t an add-on to Always Coming Home, but an essential sonic companion to the book. Le Guin clearly thought music was important to the Kesh people, filling the book with references to music and even inventing several musical instruments from scratch – some of which Barton has built and played on the album, including a seven-foot horn called a houmbúta and a Weosai Medoud Teyahi bone flute.

Through Barton’s expert composition, the book snaps vividly into focus. Le Guin and Barton, with several guest musicians, created a compelling world through sound that made the stories in Always Coming Home come even more alive. Combining field recordings made by Barton in Napa Valley, California, with mellifluous poems and lyrics written by Le Guin in the Kesh language she invented, the sound is simultaneously otherworldly and believable. 

Learn more (and listen to the album) at The Guardian.