Nada Canadada

The Four Horsemen was a sound poetry group of Canadian poets composed of bpNichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton and Steve McCaffery. The group started performing in 1970 and quickly moved from radical improvisation to the use of a notational system – with an effort to develop a scoring method adequate to the group’s dynamic and visceral sound show – designed to give them even more freedom of expression
The group became then a living workshop with regular weekly rehearsals leading to the best refined group-conceived and group-written compositions. The excitement generated by composing and performing poetry separately is magnified when these acts are in conjunction. Nada Canadada – nine outbursts of controlled madness dedicated to the memory of Hugo Ball – is one of the highest examples of poetry as product of a community