Scullion Sepulture by Another Dead Weirdo

Scullion Sepulture: a burial area for one's menial servants.

Although I have once again neglected to make space within these compositions for any sort of lyrical thread I think it is incredibly clear, under the light of the current moment, what I mean by titling this suite in such a way. If by some accident this composition survives into a future which is less aware of the state of things as we begin to leave the early 21st century behind for its middle I suppose it is worth restating for posterity's sake. At the time of this writing the year is 2022 CE. We are currently suffering through a 2 year long global pandemic which has been protracted and exacerbated by the ruling class's inability to accept even a marginal interruption in their own enrichment. In fact before the pandemic began the richest 10 individuals in the United States owned roughly 25% of the total wealth within its borders. That percentage has nearly doubled since. Although technically somewhat reductive, it is ultimately a fair characterization of events to say that this extreme transfer of wealth has come deliberately and rather maliciously at the expense of the world's most vulnerable people.

The death toll currently stands at well over a million worldwide and the larger meta-analysis which will eventually tally how many people have lost their lives as a direct result of pandemic's impact regardless of their personal COVID status, have yet to be undertaken. And obviously this says nothing of the many states, localities, and (one can reasonably assume) entire nations which have been grossly under-reporting their actual COVID deaths for the cynical purpose of propping up an ailing, endangered workforce and the system that demands their unending labor. And this says nothing still of the millions more who have and will be made permanently disabled by the particularly insidious effects of Long COVID or the millions more who have had to completely reevaluate their status as free individuals for the simple fact that they are particularly vulnerable to the disease in a society which has chosen to move on without accommodating those vulnerabilities.

The pandemic has, I'm sorry to say without hyperbole, destroyed my life and the lives of millions of survivors all over the globe. As a vulnerable individual I simply cannot say how long I have left before I am forced to roll the dice on my own health and re-enter a world which has only become more hostile to the vulnerable as the pandemic has dragged on. And of those vulnerable I am of a privileged few who have been able to abstain as long as I have. It was with all this in mind, with a particular focus on mourning much kinder futures which we will never see, that I undertook these compositions.

I don't know what I hope for in your experience with these recordings. Will they help heal, or simply help wallow? I couldn't presume to say. They have been somewhat healing for me to write as they offered me space within which I could experience the overwhelming pressure of our new reality in such a way that I could leave a part of it behind in the listening. There is of course always the possibility that this is a product of a lifetime of practice compartmentalizing and has nothing to do with the success of the compositions themselves. I hope they are able to serve you meaningfully regardless, even if in no way different from any of the other instrumentals in your collection of playlists.

Tracklist

1.	Morning in America	11:17

2.	Essential Workers' Lament in Fm	5:17

3.	A Tepid Echo of Stolen Futures	8:29

Credits

released September 30, 2022

This entire suite was written, performed in real time, and recorded by myself within the onboard sequencer of my Roland FA08. The tracks were then converted to WAV files and exported to Reaper where they also were mixed and mastered by myself. The cover photo was taken by me on an old Canon CoolPix with the graphic design done in Photoshop CS5.5.

License