- Black Cake Records
Zachary Schomburg collaborates with Typhoon guitarist Kyle Morton on an album of dreamy poetic soundscapes. Bianca Stone turns her poems into Diane Cluck-esque folk songs. Dot Devota juxtaposes sound collage from Ferguson protests with collaborations from travels in Taiwan. Sampson Starkweather and Brandon Shimoda collaborate with poets and musicians. Jon-Michael Frank shouts over Supremes songs like a 21st-century Steven Jesse Bernstein. Sommer Browning records a live comedy album in her living room. Less than a year and a half into its existence, Black Cake Records has already built up an impressive all-digital catalog of writers recording their work in interdisciplinary—and often surprising—ways.
"I wanted there to be a forum for publishing and sharing crossover works that were neither poetry nor records, but some kind of other performance," says Black Cake's founder, the Portland poet Kelly Schirmann. Schirmann doesn't set strict constraints on Black Cake's sound projects, preferring to let the poets choose their own approaches. While this prompts some to create work that falls somewhere between art forms, others create comparatively straightforward audio chapbooks.
Schirmann's interested in what she calls "the intersection between the private act of reading and the more intimate act of being read to," and she solicits work from poets whom she suspects will create an experience that's different from simply encountering words on the page.
