Paul Dutton (born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1943) is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist, and oral sound artist who often collaborates with fellow vocal sound artists Jaap Blonk, Koichi Makigami, Phil Minton, and David Moss in the group Five Men Singing. Other collaborators have included such musicians as John Butcher, Bob Ostertag, Dominic Duval, Phil Durrant, John Russell, Lee Ranaldo, Christian Marclay, Günter Christmann, and Alexander Frangenheim. His soundsinging has been called "fascinating, inventive, grippingly obsessive" (The Wire).
(Five Men Singing) exposes every note, tone, timbre and texture that can be vibrated by the uvula, dredged from the throat and buzzed from the cheeks and lips.
A member of the legendary Four Horsemen sound poetry quartet (1970—1988), along with Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Steve McCaffery, and the late bpNichol, he married his soundsinging oralities and harmonica-playing to John Oswald’s alto sax and Michael Snow’s piano and synthesizer in the free-improvisation band CCMC (1989 to the present).
Mr. Dutton has recently appeared in poetry festivals in Germany, France, and Venezuela, and at music festivals in Canada, Holland, and Argentina. An accomplished writer, in addition to his published books, he has written dozens of published essays on music and writing.
More recently, he formed Quintet à Bras in company with two French poets and two French instrumentalists, and in 2009, Mr. Dutton performed at The Scream In High Park, which is an annual literary festival in Toronto.
"The hybridity of Dutton’s æsthetic accomplishments is readily apparent on this CD’s (Mouth Pieces) opening track, Reverberations. Framing the words "gong" and "going" with the use of vowel-generated overtones, Dutton crystallizes form and content in a perfectly balanced musical and literary mantra."
"Whether reading or gurgling, solo Dutton remains compelling."