why we love this

The poems and sound works embrace the uncanny. At once, the material sourced feels absurdist and utterly distant from our underlying, everyday lives, but on a closer listen, Bennett’s lyricism seeps into the psyche and mirrors the true absurdity of what makes up our daily lives.

about the record

John M. Bennett has been a prolific contributor on the absolute fringes of the American poetry, mail-art, and underground music worlds throughout his career, while working as a scholar and archivist of Latin American literature and avant-garde writing.

A Flattened Face Fogs Through features selected works by John M. Bennett spanning from 1986 to 1995. Concrete experiments with voice and tape manipulation, FM synthesis, early sampling keyboards, experimental percussion, flutes, and saxophones create a phantasmagorical backdrop for Bennett’s panting and gurgling poetry performances, spinning a sputtering picture of a quaking domestic void, at times evoking an almost Lynchian existential dread emanating from the shopping center parking lot. They represent a fraction of John M. Bennett’s massive output in this marginal but fertile artistic community, and should stand as a testament both to it and to the underlying strangeness of language, the American Midwest, and of being itself.