No other people

"The title, No other people., is taken from Raymond Roussel's New Impressions of Africa, a fifty-nine page poem which took him fifteen years to write - a length of time mainly caused by his tortuous compositional methods. In Roussel, sentences are broken down in maze-like ways, often producing others which relate to the sound of the original. I'm not aware of any direct, illustrative connection between the music of No other people. and Roussel's book. But I was very struck by the everydayness of Zo's drawings. There is something poignant in his not knowing what he was illustrating. Like the drawings of a blind person. Their banality takes on a mysteriousness by being placed by Roussel in his book, seeming to illustrate bizarre events unknown to Zo. They are impersonal, the people in them unaware that they lead another life in a poem of which they know nothing. Something of this is in the music." Gerald Barry, 2009