THE WAY by David Curington
1. NO TOUCHING.
2. NO MEANING.
3. NO HANDS.
4. NO DOUBT.
THIS IS THE WAY.
Square ears founder David Curington returns with a second four-track cassette for the label, this time his dense layers of sounds achieving more sonic clarity but only as a trade-off for further conceptual elusiveness.
Curington plays armchair musicologist, that is, if said musicologist had no academic track record, the critical thinking skills of the free online text-to-speech generator that he is fond of and only YouTube and Spotify as references for alarmingly short bibliographies.
Four straw-man musical premises are tackled with the musical precision and conceptual flair of a merry-go-round fed into an industrial crusher:
NO TOUCHING deals with the notion of musical beauty. Whispered quotations by Eduard Hanslick are counterpointed with automated chapter headings from an article reframing beauty as the compression of information and testimonies from musical anhedoniacs obscure a mash-up of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and the opening movement of Ravel’s String Quartet. You can listen, but you can’t touch.
NO MEANING subverts music as quasi-religious experience. Samples from various religious services are superimposed and looped to provide a basic processual rhythm while critical texts on religion and an ASMR track provide a whispered foreground, not-so-subtly subverting the musical context into which they are placed. Religious fear blends into primal animal fear when samples are convoluted with noises from elephants, lions and crocodiles, at which point the music descends into a much more ambiguous sonic texture, musical material never recovering its original religious function.
NO HANDS explores musical gesture and gesture as music. A virtual tour from an estate agent, punctuated by stock gestural sound effects and a counsellor assessing their emotional impact forms the musical backing while the “tau gap” (which measures the motion gap between the beginning and end state of a physical gesture and is announced by esteemed mathematician Terence Tau) between the music’s current state and various sampled references is calculated. As gestural communication in humans begins in the womb, a foetus in utero offers amniotic imitations of material as the music progresses.
Finally, NO DOUBT offers a conceptual corollary to the previous three tracks, imagining a musical world where musical beauty, secularism and gesture were either strictly regulated or banned. John Cage, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern are in jail for their musical sins while a prison guard offers a tour to a visitor. Pitch in the track is strictly corrected to major and minor scales, quotations from dictators past and present are read out and a granulated police siren wails over the top.
This is THE WAY towards the degradation of a nation.
Tracklist
| 1. | NO TOUCHING | 6:53 |
| 2. | NO MEANING | 6:33 |
| 3. | NO HANDS | 6:26 |
| 4. | NO DOUBT | 7:43 |
Credits
Production, mixing and album art by David Curington.
Mastered by Taylor Deupree at 12k.
