The Poet and the Percussionist

Roughly 70 miles from London sits a two-story creative compound in Cambridgeshire, England, that houses perhaps the largest percussion collection in the world, owned by the only deaf Grammy-winning (twice) percussionist, Dame Evelyn Glennie.

That is where, in early 2024, producer/engineer Ian Brennan set out for by train from London with poet Raymond Antrobus. Brennan had suggested that Antrobus and Glennie collaborate on a project, which led to the opportunity for two of the most famous deaf artists in the world to unite on record.

Antrobus, of Jamaican British origin, was not discovered to be deaf until age six. His debut book was published in 2018 at age 32, and only three years later, he was appointed an OBE. He has received multitudes of honors for his poetry, which explores his self-identity in provocative splashes through the lens of his deeply personal experiences.

Scottish-born Glennie is the first full-time deaf solo percussionist and has worked with artists such as Bjork, Mark Knopfler and Bela Fleck, as well as orchestral projects for such events as the 2012 Olympics and the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1993, she was appointed an OBE for her services to music. In 2007, she was made a Dame Commander and was promoted to Damehood by Queen Elizabeth II the following year.

Brennan met Antrobus after inviting him to one of his own book events. In 2022, the poet agreed to record his first spoken-word album, The First Time I Wore Hearing Aids, with Brennan, after which Brennan suggested a collaboration with Glennie. Antrobus jumped at the opportunity.

“I knew of Evelyn’s work,” Antrobus said through email communication. “I’d seen her documentary about teaching deaf students to become musicians, percussionists, like her, so she was actually a kind of an example of a visible deaf role model for me. I’m really, really honored to have collaborated with one of, I think, the icons.”

After meeting Glennie a few times during the course of his regular work, Brennan reached out to ask if she would write the foreword to his 2024 book, Missing Music: Voices From Where the Dirt Roads End. By then, Brennan had become a champion for the voices of missing music.

After making records in the 1980s and doing field recording in the ’90s, then receiving Grammy nominations in the early 2000s for a couple of traditional folk albums he produced, Brennan turned toward international musical documentation in 2010 with Yigoli Y’ Izahabu, The Good Ones in Rwanda. Projects such as Zomba Prison Project, Ustad Saami and Parchman Prison Project followed. Early last year, Brennan once again found himself walking into a strange new environment with his minimalist recording package—a battery-operated Zoom F8n 8-track recorder and a selection of mics—to document a voice that is, for any number of reasons, rarely heard. On this day, it was Glennie’s compound.

EXPERIENCING SOUND

Over the course of three hours, Brennan captured about 30 pieces recorded live without overdubs, mostly first takes. Every note played by Glennie was improvised to Antrobus’ words, which she had never seen before. Through a process led by instinct, Glennie gravitated mostly toward playing waterphone on the recording, sometimes bowed.

She used other instruments as the impulse struck her, including a timpani and a Hang metal, melodic drum. At the end—the equivalent of a morning session in a union studio—Brennan says he had enough material for what would become two parts of one project—Another Noise, which came out in 2024, and Aloud, released this August.

“This collaboration has been a real shift in perspective for me,” Glennie wrote. “With music, percussion tends to drive tempo, anchor groove, and shape energy and sound-color within a defined structure. You’re working inside a shared system of time and harmony. But with poetry, especially the work of Raymond Antrobus, the framework isn’t musical in the traditional sense—it’s linguistic, emotional, even spatial.

“Raymond and I are artists who happen to be deaf,” she continues. “We experience sonics not just through hearing, but through vibration, intuition and attention to detail in ways that are often overlooked in our hearing-dominated culture. We’re attuned to the edges and layers of sound, the spaces where it begins to disappear, or shift into something more tactile. That sensitivity isn’t a limitation—it’s an expansion and necessity. It opens up other entry points of listening, and of responding.”

Glennie found some pieces more challenging than others, noting, “Some presented an immediate emotional or rhythmic entry point, while others held me at a distance at first. That’s where the challenge came in; not in the technical sense of playing, but in understanding—or rather, allowing myself not to understand right away.

“There were poems where Raymond’s delivery was sparse, fragmented or deeply internal. In those moments, I had to resist the temptation to ‘fill in’ the space. That’s hard, especially as a percussionist, where our instinct is often to shape time, to push or pull energy. But some of these pieces required the opposite—they asked me to wait, to sit in the discomfort of stillness, and only respond when something genuinely called for sound.”

The experience of recording with a musician was completely new to Antrobus, but he chose to simply focus on his voice and his words. “I think if I was to think about how to craft a sound that was outside of mine, I would have started overthinking things a bit,” he admits. “So, I just thought it was best for me to stay in my lane for this one, and trust Evelyn and Ian to create something that is unique, off the cuff and interesting, because my job is the words.”

RECORDING SIMPLIFIED

Brennan describes the main recording setup, in an upstairs room of Glennie’s home, as the three of them configured in an oblong triangle. “There was about seven feet between Raymond and Evelyn, and four feet between me and Raymond,” he explains. “Evelyn was facing straight ahead, and Raymond was facing a bit inward toward me.

“With the type of recording I do, coverage is kind of everything,” he adds. “If possible, I’ll use multiple mics—like two or three vocal mics on someone—if it’s not intimidating to them, because sometimes there’ll be a pop on one and not on another, or some transient sound that gets on one but not on the other.”

Four mics—Sennheisers in stereo toward the instruments, a Shure SM7 to help isolate any noises, and an AKG C14—surrounded Glennie, who was seated on the floor, and three mics—a Brauner Phantom Classic, an EV RE20, and a Neumann TLM 103mt—were set up around Antrobus. A Telefunken Elektroakustik M80 Dynamic was laid on the floor but not used in the mix. When they recorded downstairs, Antrobus and Glennie were positioned on opposite sides of the 5-foot wide timpani, and Antrobus held the Telefunken for two songs that were completely improvised.

Brennan mentions “Missed Salutations” as a favorite. “It’s pretty cool just because I tend to gravitate toward the experimental stuff,” he says, noting that Glennie accompanied with a giant kettle drum, placing various small hand-percussion instruments on top of the drum head.

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Everything was mixed in Apple Logic Pro. “I try to mix transparently,” Brennan explains. “No reverb, minimal or no compression, light on the EQ, and panning that mirrors the reality of the space. My goal is almost always intimacy and air, or space, so lots of close-miked sources and dryness, as if the singers are whispering in the ear.”

Brennan says his biggest challenge on the project was the engineer, pointing to himself. “I’m not Vance Powell, Leslie Ann Jones or Michael Romanowski. I’m not a genius engineer. I never set out to be an engineer. I come from the music end of it, from the poet end of it, the writing end of it, and the human end of it with all the social work, and that’s really what I care about. I’ve been very fortunate that so many records have worked on some level that should not have.”

The type of non-traditional recording he does— live, without overdubs, usually one take, not in a studio, mostly outdoors, without headphones, no listening back—is about the experience, not the product, he says: “You just have to do it and trust. This was a leap of faith, and everybody went into it not only willingly, but I think very enthusiastically.”