5cense 607> Ceci n'est pas un record: lost tetrads of defunked recording mediums

30 Nov 2018 | Rome> We aint gunna rome no rione in this post, our bedder-½ is off in Bangkok... or actually by now she's on her way to Jo'Burg to hang w/ Jay-Z + B-yonce + a bunch of Afrikin prezidents. So we's cooped in our attico doghouse rapping up our album, wich we gunna call "un" just cuz... like our mantra sted of om... uuuunnnn ... + un looks the same upside-down as right-side up... + its our fave grammatickle prefix, we like how it can unravel a word jus by preseeding it, like turn 'sound' into 'unsound'. We perty much done w/ un (written lowercase not to confuse w/ UN, wich spose it's also a nod to that, where our bedder-½ slaved away this past year)... @ least enuff so we sent it off to put it on wax, wich sounds all fantsy + high-fluting but here's the ketch... we onelie gunna make 2 copies, haha. We'd print onelie 1 copy, but if we hang hit on our wall then we'd onelie be able to see 1 side + b-sides there's 2 of us in Sound Furies. Dat + unbridled reproduction leads to diminished quality. The "more the merrier" is bullshit.

Jus like how we is w/ books, we's old shcool in dat we like fizzickle objets, just don't feel rite gong thru all this f-fort to just to have sum digitoll files on a hardrive. What if Marshins came to our planit after we've wiped ourselves out—will bites on a crashed hardrive suffice as a "record" of our prior ∃xistence? Not dat they'd know what to do w/ a vinyl record ether... but dunno, jus looks mo cool, like it shd stand for sumping. This "record" we making is in fact a record of our ∃xistence, this past year, or 9 months actually since we didn't even get our instrawments til last March... 9 months ha, like we's having a bebe wich this record also stands in for dat u cd say since we don't buy into bioillogical reproduction... @ least not of the humun race, plenty udder ppl to go around on this dam planit. In the '60s baby-boomer-born folks said "make love, not war" but fuck dat... @ least if u don't wear a raincoat. It's been 60 yrs since the '60s + we say "make art, not babies". Or as the sane goes, make beautiful music together.

We also abide buy whatever member of New Order said in dat documentary about Joy Division, how when they met (@ a Sex Pistols show circa '77) punk rock was all about the finger-flipping "fuck you" but they flipped it around to just say "we're fucked." 40 yrs later we're still fucked, more than ever. That's also our mantra.

So yah, this un record is litteruley our bebe. The "cover" of the record will be the record itself, why we're laying it down on wax... it can never be reel, but u can try to come close as u can... "ceci n'est pas une pipe" or whatever it is Magritte said, replacing pipe w/ LP. + to add a layer of inward-spireling treachery/self-referentiality we're making a pitcher disk + the imedge we's putting on the disk looks like a record, if dat makes inny cense. Perhaps it will when/if u, dear Inurnet, ever see hit. Stay tooned. We aint about to reveil the image here/now + spoil the fun, suffice to say we considered making a rubbeing or etching of a record + using dat as the pitcher to put on the disk, but then googling around we found out Lee Ranaldo (whose band bears a sonic remblance to ours) beat us to the punch... not dat he used the image for a cover or pitcher disk of inny album, he just called it art:

from "Villa Arson" series, by Lee Renaldo, 2014, drypoint etching
from vinyl scratched on walls of Villa Arson, Nice

Sumping along these lines. We also came across the b-lo imedge wich we considered, tho forget where we found it or what exactly hit is xcept dat it was a bronze from "Eturia" wich i guess was what the dem Greeks called Tuscany:

But this wd be hard to convey in 2-d. So what we did is take the barb-wired landscape that last we said wd be on the cover + converted it to polar coordinates. That's all wheel say for now. So yah, we done more or less w/ the album, now we is just waiting for them to press hit + we's working on the video, wich gots us dredging out our old video camraw + shoebox of tapes... never imagined DV tapes from less than a decade ago wd be retro or old shcool, but guess they're the new VHS or cassette already. We even had to get our old iMac out to transfer them as they keep changing all the inputs on these dam computers... impossible to keep up w/ all the various converters + do-hickys u need.

Part of why we's blabbing on + on here is dat there's a lot of time spent waiting for the xfer + it's sort of distracting having on in the background. Sumtimes we git so fixated on creation dat when we go back + watch even resent footage we reeleyes hit's all happening rite before our very eyes in every instant yo. Ez to forget dat when 1 is so busy documenting. And we aint even on inny social media, ppl get reely obsessed, like we was reading about how natural landmarks are getting ruined cuz of 'geotagging'—ppl see a pic on Instragram taken by a tastemaker or celebrity + then they feel they got to go to the same spot + take a selfie so suddenly millions of ppl are flocking to a pertickler geotagged spot dat very few used to go to before.

We're also gathering up footage off archive.org of old movies in the public domain + teaching ourself Adobe Premiere + After FX wich aint so ez to figger out believe u me. Sum of our old footedge we transferred already or maybe even halve it up on youtube, but we saved them in lo rez + edited them down to short clips to not take up too much space on our old machine wich dint have mush room to spare. + we're also shooting more footage as we speak, in pertickler of them starlings we obssessed over in 2010-2011... its happening all over again every evening @ sunset yo! So we shooting more b-roll from our palatial attico p.o.v. to go w/ this un video.

2 Dec 2018> For the last 6 months or so we've been "reading" The Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan, wich seems apt to our current media-mad mindset. We put 'read' in quotes cuz it' aint reely the kind of book u sit down + read, so much as consult, like 1 wood the I Ching. Before he died, McLuhan started working w/ these so-called tetrads, which are koan-like associative texts/poems, where he takes a word + expands on hit a'cording to a 4-pronged strucksure (dat he considered natural laws of sorts):

1. obsolesce
2. retrieve
3. enhance/amplify
4. reverse into

Knot shore we toetally buy into it, but it's an intresting way of thinking about shit for shore + prawvides a framework/constraint dat fosters creativity, mush like Brian Eno's oblique strategies dat he'd write on index cards to give hym ideas when he was stumped or needed prodding. Here's sum samples (relevant to our current mindset):

 

I forget what F stands for, think it's sposed to mean reverse but forgot how he got an F out of it, may-b F stands for forget, or flips. Also intresting the parallel between these 4 constructs + Vico's 4-ply cycle dat Joyce used in Finnegans Wake + all the other 4-faceted cycles we was obsessed with in riding The Becoming + A Raft Manifest. Dat said, we think we're outgrowing the # 4 + ready to move onto the # 5... in pertickler we've bin thinking a lot about pentatonic scales, but that's the subject of a whole nother post.


 606 <( )> 608 > Bridging the gap in rione V b-tween storni, Cenci + Mastriani

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