At a staggering 31 tracks, one for every day of the month, Karen Schoemer’s August (Dromedary Records) is a poetry reading coming through your headphones from a far-off, sun-worn desertscape. Foregoing catchy riffs for cathartic lines of poetry, August is a collection of spoken word vignettes set to instrumental music, warbling like the shimmering summer heat. (It really twists the knife in, listening to it on a sub-zero day). Sometimes the music is chordal, other times abstract and Space-Age-y, but it’s always uncanny. Schoemer’s poetry is the main character. The lines, read by her, are floated out like fragmented thoughts, held cryptically together through bold images and recurring themes, turning observations of the everyday into things with non-zero strangeness—into a dreamlike defamiliarization (“August 20” and “August 26” are truly unsettling).
The poetry’s accompanying music is sparse, but it varies: Some tracks have beats and chords like “August 4” or “August 25”; others are simply welling unidentifiable sound, like “August 12.” It’s no wonder: Ten different musicians composed the 31 tracks, each adding their own flavor. Some have some gentle singable riffs, like “August 1.” Others deploy extreme minimalism, rising barely above a whisper, like “August 19.” “August 3” and “August 6” are sci-fi sounding, matching Schomer’s reading voice, which sounds like the poetic reincarnation of the gentle, yet foreboding HAL 9000. You’ll definitely weird some people out if you stick this on, especially when Schoemer floats out lines like “Your skeleton is a fence with gated limbs.” But those people wouldn’t know good spoken-word-electronic-sound-art-poetry-Americana if it ran them over with a truck.
This article appears in April 2026.
