review by Fred Cisterna/Amazon.com
Words and sounds are poet Edwin Torres' raw material; on his debut CD, Holy Kid, he pushes, stretches and twists them in striking ways.

The disc is definitely not a straight-up spoken word document. Torres has created an expansive work with room for dense audio/verbal/musical artistry and simple recitation. Torres uses Nuyorican (New Yorkers of Puerto Rican heritage) inflections, wacky cartoon-like chattering and Jamaican dancehall vocal stylings to perform "Rhumba Bombalett." The track captures a funny, unrelenting spray of utterances. DJ Wally's turntable work adds beats, atmosphere – and when appropriate, silence – to this wild and goofy piece.

"All Colors Not White," by contrast, is all restraint and spareness. Torres's assured reading is set against a whirring loop that features a "hook" made up of what sounds like dog barks and canine cries. Torres's speech accelerates throughout, rushing forward until it lands on a simple pair of words intoned as a question – "not white?" The poet is finished, but the loop goes on, evoking ghost town desolation.

Torres worked on Holy Kid for almost two years, spending weekends recording at engineer/musician John Noll's Retromedia Studios. The pair incorporated 4-track recordings Torres had made at home but also laid down fresh tracks in the Red Bank, NJ studio. Eventually Executive Producer Jordan Trachtenberg stepped in and the trio managed to transform what would have been a demo tape into a final product. Olympia, WA-based Kill Rock Stars, which had released a number of "Wordcore" records, snapped it up. Torres feels that Holy Kid benefited from the lengthy recording period. "What I learned is that the more time you can have with something, the better. We were able to do stuff, listen to it, change it as opposed to try to put something out in a few months."

Torres recently performed in New York City on a bill showcasing Kill Rock Stars recording artists as part of CMJ MusicFest, an event featuring over a thousand bands, many with tons of hi-tech and/or stylishly retro gear; Torres had a couple of microphones, a few homemade audiotapes, some ragtag props and an arsenal of words. The audience had come to the Kill Rock Stars night to get hit with raw, loud music, but they listened attentively to Torres' poems and soundscapes. His utterances mixed with bar clatter and the muted rumble of the band playing downstairs. Despite the distractions, the crowd was taken in by the poet's words, soundings and presence.

Chatting over coffee at a Soho cafe, Torres says that he's accustomed to doing poetry readings in varied settings – theaters, academic environments, cafes, bars. The New York native chooses and presents his material accordingly. Referring to the Kill Rock Stars show, he says, "I knew that people were there to listen to something visceral. I wanted to get across pieces that had difficult language and also real accessible stuff. And I wanted to use this sound element – with tapes and feedback – that I'm interested in."

Torres's involvement with sound runs deep. He's down with Soviet Cubo-Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov's notion of zaum or beyonsense – a transrational language that employs sound-oriented neoligisms. The Nuyorican wordslinger's output can be viewed as part of a sonic writing tradition that could include the work of poet Jackson Mac Low, composer John Cage, German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, and brilliant nineteenth century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Torres believes that there is "a conversion/healing aspect to sound. I'm more interested in that than language. The sound gets into the language and it's up to me to funnel it and do something with it."

Torres grew up in a Bronx household that had Spanglish in the air. So it's no surprise that invented words, linguistic crossover and all sorts of wordplay figure largely in his work. When you don't understand every word that your family is speaking, you grab onto the sounds of words and savor them. This fundamental experience of speech as sonority may be one reason that Torres's complex exploration of language is so natural and free of pretension. Torres entered the world of performance and poetry in an unusual way. In the late '80s, he often left playful phone messages on his friends' answering machines. One friend, who ran a literary magazine, asked Torres to perform the messages at a benefit. Torres lit up at the idea. He says, "It was like a faucet opened."

He went on to do "one-man variety shows" in small funky venues on New York's Lower East Side. Around this time, at the suggestion of a friend, Torres attended a reading at Poets House. Three key Nuyorican poets, Bimbo Rivas, Jorge Brandon and Miguel Algarin (who founded the Nuyorican Poets Cafe) read their work. Torres was impressed. He thought, "Just words – and they're really funny and interesting." After the reading, Algarin told Torres about the Cafe where he started to read regularly. In 1991, Torres was awarded the Cafe's Fresh Poetry Prize, "which was a big acknowledgment to me that there's something happening here."

Since then, Torres has self-published three chapbooks and his work has appeared in a number of anthologies including, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, An Anthology of New (American) Poets, and Verses That Hurt: Pleasure and Pain from the Poemfone Poets. He's also included on the CD compilations, Flippin' The Script: Rap Meets Poetry, Poemfone New Word Order, and Nuyorican Symphony: Poetry Live at the Knitting Factory. And he recently performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At the moment, Torres is involved in a dizzying number of activities. "I feel like I'm building this mountain," he excliams. Torres is continuing to work on "Gecko Suite," a mini-opera; he has a book coming out on Sub, a small Washington D.C. press; and on top of that, he wants to release another CD. Then there's the novel he's writing.