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Headphones Required!!!

The Future Leaks Out is a modular synthesizer piece for two performers, in which spoken word audio recordings are cut up in a similar manner to the Surrealist “Exquisite Corpse” game or the “cutup” literary method of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. The work is performed in four sections, utilizing a unique “text” with musical accompaniment. There are short musical interludes between sections inspired by the previous and upcoming texts. The length of the performance is 60 minutes.

The cut-up technique is a method of creating new textual arrangements from existing printed material by cutting pages into smaller pieces, rearranging, and then reading the result. With audio recordings, the procedure is similar: recordings of sentences are cut into smaller pieces, and at the end of each fragment a new fragment is selected using chance procedures. The result is juxtapositions of words with new poetic, contextual, and (according to Burroughs) prophetic connotations. Burroughs was once quoted as saying, in reference to the cut-up technique: “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.”

The four-section structure of the composition is echoed by the spatial arrangement of four speakers in quadrophonic sound. A listener may hear a cut-up sentence on one topic in one corner of the room, followed by a cut-up sentence on a different topic from another corner of the room, creating an evolving flow of new sentences and meanings to the original text.

In addition to Burroughs, Surrealism and Dada, the piece echoes multimedia compositions such as John Cage’s Indeterminacy, and calls back to various eras of music technology via the use of modular synthesizers and digital sampling.

This release was constructed from two sets of direct input quadrophonic (four-channel) recordings made during the two live performances of this piece at the Black Mountain College ReViewing Festival in fall 2018, and again at Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center in December 2018.

The recording is mixed for binaural listening by Mike Johnson, using several instances of the soundhack ++binaural plugin. The binaural playback simulates the quadraphonic space in which the original performances took place, and requires headphones for the full effect.

credits

released March 15, 2019

Composed and performed by Eric "Rodent" Cheslak and Walker Farrell
Mixed and Mastered by Mike Johnson at NewZone
Cover design by Peter Speer

Special thanks: Make Noise, soundhack, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Anthony Baldino, Peter Speer, Mike Johnson, Lou Rawls, John Cage, Diamanda Galas, Donna Haraway, William S Burroughs, Brion Gysin.

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Walker Farrell Asheville, North Carolina

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