"Trismegistus" and its contents is an exploration in semiotics and deconstructionism, as proposed by Jacques Derrida in his seminal work "Of Grammatology". I find this quote is the most salient of this work:
“There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer any simple origin. For what is reflected it split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, or the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three.”
In this instance, the image are the texts I asked participants to read and record and the reflecting pools are the processes I used to distort, delay, and reverberate the audio until it becomes something new. The "simple origin", as Derrida puts it, is gone and has become obfuscated by these processes and becomes a reflection and doubles, and then doubles again.
I asked the participants (who I will list below) to read the following passage from Barbara Ehrenreich:
“What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your life.”
“...Maybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly — the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple.”
“I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness and, better yet, joy. In my own vision of utopia, there is not only more comfort, and security for everyone — better jobs, health care, and so forth — there are also more parties, festivities, and opportunities for dancing in the streets. Once our basic material needs are met — in my utopia, anyway — life becomes a perpetual celebration in which everyone has a talent to contribute. But we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.”
By synthesizing these components, similar to how Alvin Lucier composed his piece "I Am Sitting in A Room", where the source becomes null after so many processes that render it nearly unrecognizable. Of course, this was achieved virtually and through electronic effects, but I believe the intent is still there. I asked these talented performers to record their samples as naturally as possible, allowing noise and change of environment to creep in and create new and interesting timbres when put through these various effects.
The second piece, "Tristram Shandy" follows a similar concept, instead using radio broadcasts to create these timbres, similar to the tape and radio experiments of John Cage and the avant-garde composers of the early twentieth century. This piece takes inspiration from Laurence Sterne's pre-modernist novel "Tristram Shandy" and is, in effect, a stream-of-consciousness piece, being freely improvised and completely aleatoric.
The final piece, "The Bloom of Morning, is a another freely improvised saxophone piece, along the same lines of my piece "Obfuscation (For Alto Sax). Much like the first piece, it heavily relies on delay, reverb, and natural harmonics and overtones of the saxophones in a reverberant space. This piece, in my opinion, is a digital version of The Deep Listening Band's material from 1989. As the piece progresses, more layers are added to the existing loop, thus creating a richer sonic tapestry, although Derrida's concept of the Spring is, if I may turn a phrase, no longer flowing.
credits
released April 10, 2023
I'd like to thank the following individuals who loaned their voices to this recording:
Kelsey Chapman
Tanner Johnson
Hayduke X
Tali LaLonde
Melora Cayce
Fierychord
Daniel Bay
Ben Lovelock
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