Contemplating the voice apparatus - AGF’s Source Voice at the limits of ‘poemproducing’

Abstract

This article is a study of the nexus between voice, technology and vocal enunciation in the work of AGF (aka Antye Greie-Ripatti), an electronic musician, producer, composer and singer based in Hailuoto, Finland. It offers a definition of AGF’s ‘poemproducing’, a technique, practice and poetic that radically challenges the centrality of ‘human’ and embodied voice in enunciation and instead thinks voice as immediately entangled in the complex web of a natural/cultural linguistic/technological apparatus. Starting from this definition, the article discusses the aesthetic and political consequences of this approach, focussing on its most radical example the album Source Voice (2013), read through Giorgio Agamben’s definition of gesture and means without ends.