....based on a 40s dadaist poem

Stewart Lee has lent his voice to an avant-garde new app based on a dadaist poem.

The comic read Kurt Schwitters’ 1946 verse London Onion for the iPhone app Londonion. The poet wrote the piece as a tribute to his new home after fleeing Nazi Germany.

The software combines Lee’s reading with the random sounds and fluctuating noise-levels of the listener’s immediate surroundings to create a unique version of the poem, which can be saved to the phone.

Artist Jane Pollard, who created the app with Iain Forsyth, said: ‘We needed somebody who was going to be able to jump into it and have a wryness and a dryness and cope with the repetition and the phonic abstraction of it and yet do it with a delivery that makes the poem contemporary and brings it to life, and that’s where Stewart Lee comes in for us.’

Here’s a video about how it was put together:

And click here to get the app, which was released yesterday.

Published: 6 Apr 2013