And To In A – What a strange title for an album and song by the Austrian music quintett 5K HD, our featured artist of this week. Does it have a meaning at all? Or is it just a kind of sound language? There is a simple explanation, how the band’s front-singer and lyricist Mira Lu Kovacs came up with it: Poetry.

From John Cage to Edwin Morgan

Edwin Morgan was a well known Scottish poet, who died almost 90 years old in 2010. Noteworthy, he found massive influence in the American beat poets of the 1950s and 1960s like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg or William S. Burroughs. Therefore, their simple, accessible ideas and language were prominent features in his work.

Hence, in his sonnet Opening The Cage of 1966, Morgan made 14 variations out of a quote by the artist and composer John Cage:

By merely taking all possible combinations of the 14 words, there are over 87 billion combinations. Indeed, most of these combinations would not make any sense at all. But surely there are more than 14 that would make some sort of sense. As a conclusion, this means the author did not just take 14 lines that make little sense and compose a random poem. Instead, each variation builds upon the previous and leads to the next one.

From Edwin Morgan to 5K HD’s Poetry

Mira adopts this approach and varies her own saying: “A poet brings sense and order to words.” As a result, she creates a variety of new phrases. “Bring words in order a sense to a poet.” “Brings sense in a poet out order and words.” And more…

But she gets even one step further by asking herself, what is left if you omit the words “sense” and “order,” “poet” and “words”? Are the words losing their meaning? And poetry losing their order?

“And”, “To”, “In”, “A”.

A question you have to answer for yourself.

The poetic sound language of 5K HD

The debut album of 5K HD is the variation of its own, poetic sound language between jazz and pop, between electronic and acoustic, between silence and noise.

Buy on iTunes.