We launched a new website! In addition to generally looking less like 2003 and more like 2013, the site should be more easily navigable. The artists page is simplified, making it easier to locate specific recordings and also easier to discover new music. We welcome any feedback about the site.
The big news, however, is about 2017.
With collaborators from around the world, we set James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to music unabridged. Twice. But Finnegans Wake being the expansive book that it is… we decided to organize one final group release. Whereas we focused on entire chapters in the previous two editions, contributors are now invited to take much shorter passages of the book — a page, a few pages — to set to music.
Unlike the previous two editions this will be an “incomplete edition” (as opposed to an unabridged edition). The big release will be this coming winter, 2017 calendar year. People can continue to contribute individual passages well into posterity for the “incomplete edition”, but as far as we can anticipate this winter will be the final large group release of Waywords and Meansigns.
It seems the nature of the Finnegans Wake, to demand an endless supply of readers and readings. This risks, perhaps, creating an endless ocean wherein listeners get lost in the… wake… but as our two original editions – these two behemoths of wild wonderful hours upon hours – reach and inspire new ears in future years, it is our hope that this “incomplete edition” will be a vehicle wherein listeners are in turn encouraged to become readers, singers, shouters, and whisperers of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The book that keeps demanding, inspiring, confusing.
We are interested in contributions from all kinds of people — musicians, artists, poets, scholars, weirdos, passionate Wake-heads, those totally ignorant of the Wake, and anyone generally adventurous.
See our “Get Involved” page for more information, or contact Derek at waywordsandmeansigns@gmail.com.
Please invite friends, post on social media, spread the word!
Thank you for your continued support of our weird little idea.
