Voices. Translations of Paul Celan in Dub

Album. Digital and CD released in December 2025. Listen and buy on Bandcamp.

This album starts with the voice of Paul Celan: a Romanian-born Jew who survived the Holocaust to become one of the most important poets of the 20th century. His poetry is broken, halting and stuttering, yet his recitation of it is strangely rhythmic, almost metronomic.

I sampled Celan's reading of the poem Voices from the record released five years after his suicide, in 1975, and translated its cadence into rhythmic patterns with a method borrowed from the drummer Jaki Liebezeit: dots (one strike) and dashes (two strikes), like morse code. What Celan does with breath and pauses becomes the skeleton of each composition. Voice, therefore, is not only the title of the poem and record: it's subject, source, and compositional method.

The sound draws heavily from dub music: voice buried in reverb, heavy bass, effects that send words trailing off into space. But it wanders into darker, stranger territory: odd time signatures, drones, long stretches of texture and monotonous rhythms that sit between meditative and unsettling.

Celan didn't see his creations as complete; every reading of a poem leads back to its origin as much as forward into the open. This is also the ethos of dub: a recording is never finished, only versioned. Producers-artists strip tracks down, rebuild them, pass riddims between studios. What Celan did with breath and recitation, dub does with tape and reverb: treating the source not as a fixed artifact but living material.

Celan never mentioned the Holocaust in his poems. The catastrophe is always present, but unnamed. For someone who never lived in Germany, he also made a radical creative choice: to write in the language of his family's murderers. Not forgiveness, but a refusal to let a culture be reduced to its worst actors. In a time when we're pressed to pick sides and sort the world into us and them, his choice carries weight.

Dub felt like the right vessel: music that transforms without erasing. Words dissolve, echo, disappear into rhythm. But never quite vanish.