Soundtrack

Below are buildings shaped like beehives in which are furnaces with fires hot enough to be used in creating new alloys.

B is saying: People here are nostalgic for feudalism.  It's probably about a desire for community on a scale that admits of the illusion of control.  They know nothing about historical feudalism.  But no matter: what they imagine is what is real.

A is still watching the beehive furnaces. They are like a cell from one animation that has been superimposed onto another. For the people as he imagines them to be here, the facility is a space of chain link fence and floodlights & distant arrivals and departures.

B is saying: It is unlikely these buildings actually look like this.  I've seen them before as parts of a large production facility.

A is in relation to the site as the site is to its surroundings.  He looks through a plexiglass wall at silent floodlit activity. A computer engineers the substitute sound that will accompany this dream when others have it.

B is saying: Come to think of it, it's unlikely that where we are looks this way either.  It could be that you liked “The Truman Show.”

But A is not paying attention.  On a monitor run two strips of musical scores that control directly what is heard.  In the upper is continuous manufacturing music that duplicates the rhythms of machines. It is being erased. The lower replaces it with sporadic networks of spectral pitches that perform by way of timbre what the other did with rhythm. It is a rethinking of metals.

B is saying:  Once it was necessary to avoid silences and paper over gaps because to produce a world was to produce a continuity.  For most people these days the world is discontinuous.  But everyone's discontinuities work in similar ways: everyone moves through similar ranges of positive and negative space. Now we can activate imagination with a gesture or a moment. People do the work of soundtracks.  It's the upside of the colonization of desire.

A is watching the notation for clusters and spectra stream across the monitor.  They are sequences of zeros on stems.  Some have names appended to them: Keivra, Aflax, Rivarol.  Perhaps they are instructions.  It seems important to remember them.  A sees himself fumbling around a bed stand for a notebook and a pen that he knows are in another room.

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words: Stephen Hastings-King (Edge Effects)
image: '3488' - Jeff Crouch, Texas (more)


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another soundtrack: ain't no progress (#16)