Valeri Scherstjanoi

Valeri Scherstjanoi (b. 1950, Saratov, Russia) is a Russian-German sound poet and visual artist based in Berlin whose physically intense performances of pure vocal sound poetry have made him one of the most distinctive voices in European experimental poetry since the 1980s. He has developed a practice of extended vocal technique, breath work, and sound production that strips language of semantic content, treating the voice as a source of pure sonic material. He organised the Bobeobi Festivals of Sound Poetry in Berlin from 1994 to 1998, and in 2012 performed at the Maxim Gorki Theater as part of Rainald Grebe's production DADA Berlin.