In a post last year on an ambi­tious musi­cal adap­ta­tion of Finnegans Wake, I not­ed that—when most in baf­fle­ment over the Irish writer’s final, seem­ing­ly unin­ter­pretable, work—I turn to Antho­ny Burgess, who not only pre­sumed to abridge the book, but wrote more lucid com­men­tary than any oth­er schol­ar­ly crit­ic or writer­ly admir­er of Joyce. In his study ReJoyce, Burgess described the novel—or whatever-you-call-it—as a “man-made moun­tain… as close to a work of nature as any artist ever got—massive, baf­fling, serv­ing noth­ing but itself, sug­gest­ing a mean­ing but nev­er quite yield­ing any­thing but a frac­tion of it, and yet (like a tree) des­per­ate­ly sim­ple.”

Joyce did seem to aspire to omni­science and the pow­er of god­like cre­ation, to sup­plant the “old father, old arti­fi­cer” he beseech­es at the end of A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man. And if Finnegans Wake is a work of nature, it seems to me that we might approach it like nat­u­ral­ists, look­ing for its inner laws and mech­a­nisms, per­form­ing dis­sec­tions and mount­ing it, flayed open, on dis­play boards.

Or we might approach it like poets, painters, field recordists—like artists, in oth­er words. We might leave its innards intact, and instead rep­re­sent what it does to our minds when we con­front its nigh-inscrutable ontol­ogy.

This lat­ter approach is the one adopt­ed by Way­words and Mean­signs’ lat­est release, which brings togeth­er record­ings from over 100 artists from 15 dif­fer­ent coun­tries—some semi-famous, most thrilling­ly obscure. Joyce’s book, explains project direc­tor Derek Pyle, is “the kind of thing that demands cre­ative approaches—from jazz and punk musi­cians to sound artists and mod­ern com­posers, each per­son hears and per­forms the text in a way that’s total­ly unique and end­less­ly excit­ing.” We first com­ment­ed on the endeav­or two years ago, when it released 31 hours of unabridged Joyce inter­pre­ta­tion. Last year’s sec­ond edi­tion great­ly expand­ed on the singing, read­ing, and exper­i­men­tal noodling of and around Finnegans Wake.

The third edi­tion con­tin­ues what has becom­ing a very fine tra­di­tion, and per­haps one of the most appro­pri­ate respons­es to the nov­el in the 78 years since its pub­li­ca­tion. This release (stream­able above, or on Archive.org) adds to the sec­ond edi­tion a belat­ed con­tri­bu­tion from icon­ic bassist and song­writer Mike Watt (of The Min­ute­men, fIRE­HOSE, and solo fame) and “actor and ‘JoyceGeek” Adam Har­vey. (And a Gum­by-star­ring illus­tra­tion, above, by punk rock cov­er artist Ray­mond Pet­ti­bon). The third unabridged col­lec­tion of inter­pre­ta­tive musi­cal read­ings, fur­ther up, offers con­tri­bu­tions from:

Mer­cury Rev vet­er­ans Jason Sebas­t­ian Rus­so and Paul Dil­lon, Joe Cas­sidy of But­ter­fly Child, Rail­road Earth’s Tim Car­bone and Lewis & Clarke’s Lou Rogai, psych-rock­ers Kin­s­ki, vocal­ist Phil Minton, poet S.A. Grif­fin, trans­la­tor Krzysztof Bart­nic­ki, “krautrock” pio­neer Jean-Hervé Péron of faUSt, British fringe musi­cian Neil Camp­bell, Mar­tyn Bates of Eye­less in Gaza, Lit­tle Spar­ta with Sal­ly Timms (Mekons) and Mar­tin Bill­heimer, com­pos­er Seán Mac Erlaine, indi­etron­i­ca pio­neer Schnei­der TM, and many more.

If some­thing on that list doesn’t grab you, you may have stum­bled into the wrong par­ty. In any case, you’ll find hun­dreds oth­er read­ings, songs, etc. to choose from in the expand­ing three-vol­ume com­pi­la­tion. Or you can lis­ten to it straight through, from the first edi­tion, to the sec­ond, to the third. Like the book, this project cel­e­brates, imi­tates, reflects, and refracts, Way­words and Mean­signs admits entry at any point, and near­ly always charms even as it per­plex­es. The fact that no one can real­ly grasp the slip­pery nature of Finnegans Wake per­haps makes the book, and its best cre­ative inter­pre­ta­tions, all the more gen­uine­ly for every­one.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load as a Free Audio Book & Free eBook

Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Read­ing

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Gets Turned into an Inter­ac­tive Web Film, the Medi­um It Was Des­tined For

H.G. Wells Reads Finnegans Wake & Tells James Joyce: It’s “A Dead End,” “You Have Turned Your Back on Com­mon Men” (1928)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Music and writ­ing are insep­a­ra­ble in the hippest mod­ern nov­els, from Ker­ouac to Nick Horn­by to Irvine Welsh. It might even be said many such books would not exist with­out their inter­nal sound­tracks. When it comes to hip, pro­lif­ic mod­ern nov­el­ist Haru­ki Muraka­mi, we might say the author him­self may not exist with­out his sound­tracks, and they are sprawl­ing and exten­sive. Muraka­mi, who is well known for his intense focus and hero­ic achieve­ments as a marathon and dou­ble-marathon run­ner, exceeds even this con­sum­ing pas­sion with his near-reli­gious devo­tion to music.

Muraka­mi became a con­vert to jazz fan­dom at the age of 15 and until age 30 ran a jazz club. Then he sud­den­ly became a nov­el­ist after an epiphany at a base­ball game. (Hear Ilana Simons read his ver­sion of that sto­ry in her short ani­mat­ed film above). His first book’s sto­ry unfold­ed in an envi­ron­ment total­ly per­me­at­ed by music and music fan cul­ture. From then on, musi­cal ref­er­ences spilled from his char­ac­ters’ lips, and swirled around their heads per­pet­u­al­ly.

What sets Muraka­mi apart from oth­er music-obsessed nov­el­ists is not only the degree of his obses­sion, but the breadth of his musi­cal knowl­edge. He is as flu­ent in clas­si­cal as he as in jazz and six­ties folk and pop, and his range in each genre is con­sid­er­able. He has so much to say about clas­si­cal music, in fact, that he once pub­lished a book of six con­ver­sa­tions between him­self and Sei­ji Oza­wa, “one of the world’s lead­ing orches­tral con­duc­tors.”  Murakami’s 2013 Col­or­less Tsuku­ru Taza­ki and His Years of Pil­grim­age—its title a ref­er­ence to Franz Liszt—contains per­haps his most elo­quent state­ment on the role music plays in his life and work, phrased in uni­ver­sal terms:

Our lives are like a com­plex musi­cal score. Filled with all sorts of cryp­tic writ­ing, six­teenth and thir­ty-sec­ond notes and oth­er strange signs. It’s next to impos­si­ble to cor­rect­ly inter­pret these, and even if you could, and could then trans­pose them into the cor­rect sounds, there’s no guar­an­tee that peo­ple would cor­rect­ly under­stand, or appre­ci­ate, the mean­ing there­in.

“At times,” writes Scott Mes­low at The Week, “read­ing Murakami’s work can feel like flip­ping through his leg­en­dar­i­ly expan­sive record col­lec­tion.” While we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured playlists drawn from Murakami’s jazz obses­sion and from the gen­er­al vari­ety of his dis­crim­i­nat­ing (yet thor­ough­ly West­ern) musi­cal palate, these have been minus­cule by com­par­i­son with his per­son­al library of LPs, an “inspi­ra­tional… wall of 10,000 records,” the major­i­ty of which are jazz. Muraka­mi admits he always lis­tens to music when he works, and you can see part of his floor-to-ceil­ing record library, and huge speak­er sys­tem, in a pho­to of his desk on his attrac­tive­ly-designed web­site. Down below, we bring you one of the next best things to actu­al­ly sit­ting in his study, a playlist of 3,350 tracks from Murakami’s per­son­al col­lec­tion. (If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.)

Hoagy Carmichael, Lionel Hamp­ton, Her­bie Han­cock, Gene Kru­pa, Djan­go Rein­hardt, Sergei Prokofiev, Fred­er­ic Chopin… it’s quite a mix, and one that may not only remind you of sev­er­al moments in Murakami’s body of work, but will also give you a sam­pling of the sound­track to its author’s imag­i­na­tion as he tran­scribes the “cryp­tic writ­ing” we have to “trans­pose… into the cor­rect sounds” as we try to make sense of it.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 96-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

A Dream­i­ly Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Japan’s Jazz and Base­ball-Lov­ing Post­mod­ern Nov­el­ist

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness