Decoys

Away

There will be no new posts for the foreseeable future. The archive is still here.

Waiting Thieves (quaquaquaqua): A song composed with words from Waiting For Godot

Today’s decoy, Waiting Thieves (quaquaquaqua), is re-written from words in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot. Vocals are by Carol A. She’s a social worker by day, and brings a downswing to the lines, as though the words are empathised out. The collaboration was great fun. The next piece might also be from words from the same play.

Interzone / Heroin Chic: A song composed with words and phonemes from Naked Lunch

Today’s decoy, Interzone / Heroin Chic, is re-written from words and phonemes in William Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch. I remember reading this book in parts. The words of the drug addict’s world/s were alien and resistant to reading. Oh for the time to go back re-read it! Instead I’m disappearing into another foreign land, this time of auxiliary send, compression, and transpositions. Oh for an engineer! Anyway: enjoy, or whatever the word is.

The decoyist is away on holiday for a bit, so the next song will appear in about 3 weeks – something simpler, perhaps from words by Beckett.

Contact Update

New contact details have been added. Anything sent over the last 2 weeks or so will need to be re-sent due to the previous email account being prematurely discontinued by Tesco. Apologies.

A quick thanks to Roxana for encouragement and perfect timing.

Percolation

The intervals between posts here will be longer than usual from now on. Fictions written from existing works will be exclusively directed into sound recordings. The recording process has involved equipment upgrades from which there are time implications.

The trivia to this, for those interested, is as follows. The first two tunes were played on a QWERTY keyboard on GarageBand 09, a package bundled on iMacs. Future compositions will be played on a newly purchased musical keyboard, but more significantly, they will be recorded with Logic Studio. The new software offers a lot of features and conveniences, so, correspondingly, there is a steep learning curve.

The upshot of all this is that the switch to recording means a) fewer posts here, and b) that this blog will probably comment on matters relating to the recording process and the texts the compositions are written from.

Besides, the extra time between posts might not be such a bad thing. Blogging is a good prompt for getting things done, and it is immediate, but at the same time, it’s no good when you want to leave things for a while and come back to them later. Gains in immediacy can sacrifice percolation.

The next composition, likely to be posted in about a week, is based on Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs.

Orlando: a song composed with words selected and re-written from Virginia Woolf’s novel

The words to today’s decoy were selected from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and re-written into a song of the same name. Note: the sound reproduction of this track is slightly affected by the MP3 player.

An abstract fiction composed from words in Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinthes

One morning, the newspaper, that sacred receptacle, reliable in general, and as elementary as it was natural to not bring about surprises, threw itself into publishing stories about the shadowy corporation because it could never quite understand the tenacious nightmares. With this gesture it would at last try to summarize what it had previously submissively defended and veiled from the intimate hopes and terrors of the public: the rich god that annihilates with an indifference that is perhaps as much a metaphor as a mythology belaboured by centuries of its practice by those faithful enough to corroborate its sacred nature.

The stories no doubt contained errors, and limited themselves not to contradict the mythical past with indignant agitation or by means of varying truthfulness; blasphemous conjectures are dramatic, but were never dreamed of here; however, the stories had shown a translucent network of the power of suggestion.

There were complaints about the lottery, that it was an intensification of contentment, but with the aesthetic phenomenon being a feeling something like happiness. ‘Our customs are saturated with these sinuous numbers computed in order to kill’ said the newspaper. ‘Lotteries always failed at the time; they were always a dream, as they had been for the thousand years that have not erased their memory. The chance of a few has cultivated the reasons for their fulfillment. The circumstances that determined their destiny until today have also led general opinion to thinking in the shadows of vicissitudes gradually covering life with a vague hope. What this will most likely execute is that everyone will intensify the spread of peacocks. A lottery is an intensification of the time when magic barriers were designed to abandon if not obliterate losers.’

There was a certain amount of amazement at the peacocks erecting a wall around them. Walls are defences. Their fortifications, as infinitely subdivisible as they are immense, have been faithful to counting benevolent persons as the most reverent, and none less so than the Foot of the Emperor. Behind the wall of a several-storied palace was a chamber containing the Foot that secluded itself, withdrawn from a public that, incredibly, would now attack it and the assumption of symmetry and infamy it had affirmed for centuries. The Foot had an anticipation of imprisonment, of being an enemy the public threw itself at with amazement, having remembered that labyrinthine, arbitrary and invisible laws had been declared against it like poorer classes – no, like innumerable barbarians.

The things it understood about its stern justice, other than purposes powerful and absurd, were how it was astonished when people no longer stammered, trembling before the order and judgements on which the executioner operated.

To renounce this justice abominably insinuates its secrecy through publicity. As if weighted down by the heaviness of its metaphysical death, the public would say things like ‘I come from a dizzy land where teeth endlessly await to be mentioned in an alphabetical file collected in vast operations that the legendary Foot wrote to infinity in an almost atrocious variety that even it never expected to imagine.’

Finding a peaceful and happy solution from conjectures that men cannot agree on was difficult. But the tortoise teaches that the burning of the silent will cannot contradict the chance that all should participate equally in exchange. So the newspaper asked the Foot to abolish all things arbitrary and obscure: the game of chance the lottery inspired, the imminence of fines, the burning of the libraries and certain other places, the vague hope of the poor, the craftsmen who operated with an erection in the waters of the power of suggestion …

Perhaps there were secret orders drawing the Foot to be burned to a death, orders inspired by infinite tortures in its chamber, however unlikely it is that it existed. The Foot wanted to anticipate this attack on its inexplicably omnipotent attributes, but resigned itself to be the first not to be seduced by destroying on an enormous scale with them. It could never quite understand that it was being pushed by anger dark with and accompanied by an intimate exaggeration of imprisonment in darkness. It said ‘I feel that the right to consult them [the public] every sixty nights when the moon casts its shadows over lands can initiate a frightful happening: it can replace the newspaper with novels. It is not in general reliable to differ from beloved customs. However, I have abolished trivial dispositions that the sacred scriptures in the system approved of. I certainly never saw myself preserving with approval the humiliation that operates in history when all moments had been determined with the influence of the myth of the lottery.’

However, something else, something … unofficial … would originate in the mysteries of this reform. The indirect lie is natural to the interest of and comparable to the functioning of all of man’s faculties, and as in every dream there was confinement, for this was a dream because it was that pattern with a magical purpose whose relief came contaminated with another emotion: the impossible.

Monotonous (and Infamous): a song composed with words selected and re-written from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The words to today’s decoy were selected from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and re-written into a song called Monotonous (and Infamous).

The next song will be composed with words selected and re-written from Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Suggestions for book re-writes for future songs are welcome at the current address on the About page.