The Atheist Forums Playlist

[Rev. Rye]

Post-Awareness Stage 6 is without description. 

The Piece:

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[video=youtube]Post-Awareness Stage 6 is without description. [/video]

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Thoughts:

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So, I recently discovered this six-and-a-half hour album that's making the rounds on the Internet. It's one of the most powerful pieces of music I've ever listened to. Basically, it's using samples of old music that get increasingly processed over six stages, which correspond to six of the seven stages of dementia (the first is functionally the same as normal cognitive functioning, so to adapt it is redundant) to create a symbolic representation of how dementia effects the human brain. I finally took up a good-sized portion of last weekend listening to it in full.

At first, it almost seems like it was, well, remember the last scene of The Shining, where we heard Al Bowlly singing "Midnight, The Stars, and You" while the camera slowly zoomed into a picture of the 1921 Fourth of July ball at the Overlook, with Jack as the caretaker? It almost feels like this is what they'd have been playing the rest of the night. Given that Leland Kirby, the man behind The Caretaker, specifically took that pseudonym as an homage to The Shining, and that another of Bowlly's songs becomes a leitmotif throughout the project, this is almost certainly intentional. Or maybe what Lofi Hiphop Radio or vaporwave would sound like if they were actually available during the era of 78s. And once you get past how uncanny it all sounds, it almost seems rather chill (and given that the first two stages of the album correspond to the points where it barely even registers that something's very wrong, and that I think it's only around Stage 3 [album-wise] that it tends to be diagnosed, this makes sense.) Eventually, as the stages progress, the music gets more processed, and things start to sound even stranger, and the music gets even more disturbing. Even some pieces that were previously sampled start to sound legitimately malevolent, and then, eventually, it glitches out to the point where it almost sounds like it's a memory deteriorating in real time.

By Stage 4, what had been seen as relatively normal songs (with tracks of normal length that actually sound like music and even some evocative titles) give way to 20-minute sonic hellscapes with titles like "G1 - Stage 4 Post-Awareness Confusions." While I noticed a few snippets of actual music (most notably some whistles that sound a Hell of a lot like Al Jolson's whistling solos though I can't place a song and the Google Doc that's trying to identify all the samples in the work can't either), it barelty even counts as music. At one point, it starts to sound like the sirens of Hell.  The next stage, it becomes even more chaotic, with only occasional instances where the ballroom music that was used starts to become recognisable, but I don't think any of them last longer than a minute before going back into noise and chaos.

Also, before I get into the end, I should point out that the covers for each stage were made by Ivan Seal and correspond to each given stage of dementia. We start with something like a damaged paperback or newspaper, then an abstract flowerpot, then either seaweed or a very expressionistic image of a tree a la Tom Thomson, then apparently the back of a woman's head, then something I think is Marie Antoinette descending a staircase crossed with a bismuth crystal, and finally, we have a literal blank slate, a panel of wood with nothing on it adorned only in four strips of blue tape arranged in a square. And here, we get to Stage 6. Whatever samples were used for this one have been reduced to a drone that's just a few steps more complicated than white noise. And I'm honestly reminded of the last time I saw my grandmother. Her last few years were unhappy, slowly getting more scatterbrained to the point where she couldn't take care of herself. At one point, she asked how I was doing at someplace called S.R. Lewis. Shortly before she died, however, she was practically gone. The last thing I can remember her doing was open her mouth like she was about to scream, but nothing came out. After all that, I decided that if I ever reached that point, I did not want to live. Even if it meant having The Outfit put a hit out on me, I never wanted to reach that point. And, eventually, as the Caretaker's place in the world fades away in the final track, it ends up in a long organ cresdendo, then... a needle on a record  player, and we hear an old, distorted aria that used to be attributed to J.S. Bach. Whether this is the Heavenly Hosts taking him to the afterlife or a moment of terminal lucidity and whether or not that's a good thing, I don't know. All I know is that I couldn't do anything but hang down my head in sorrow. I might have cried if I didn't have an ASD, and by the end of it all, I felt empty. I didn't think about that incident with Grandma for over a decade until this album brought that memory back. I think Jean Anouilh said it best:

The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. The least little turn of the wrist will do the job. Anything will set it going: a glance at a girl who happens to be lifting her arms to her hair as you go by; a feeling when you wake up on a fine morning that you'd like a little respect paid to you today, as if it were as easy to order as a second cup of coffee; one question too many, idly thrown out over a friendly drink--and the tragedy is on.

The rest is automatic. You don't need to lift a finger. The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled since time began, and it runs without friction. Death, treason, and sorrow are on the march; and they move in the wake of storm, of tears, of stillness. Every kind of stillness. The hush when the executioner's axe goes up at the end of the last act. The unbreathable silence when, at the beginning of the play, the two lovers, their hearts bared, their bodies naked, stand for the first time face to face in the darkened room, afraid to stir. The silence inside you when the roaring crowd acclaims the winner--so that you think of a film without a soundtrack, mouths agape and no sound coming out of them, a clamor that is no more than a picture; and you, the victor, already vanquished, alone in your desert of silence. That is tragedy.

Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless. It has nothing to do with melodrama--with wicked villains, persecuted maidens, avengers, sudden revelations and eleventh-hour repentances. Death, in a melodrama, is really horrible because it is never inevitable. The dear old father might so easily have been saved; the honest young man might so easily have brought in the police five minutes earlier.

In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. That makes for tranquility. There is a sort of fellow-feeling among characters in a tragedy: he who kills is as innocent as he who gets killed: it's all a matter of what part you are playing. Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul deceitful thing, has no part in it. There isn't any hope. You're trapped. The whole sky has fallen on you, and all you can do about it is shout. Don't mistake me: I said 'shout': I did not say groan, whimper, complain. That, you cannot do. But you can shout aloud; you can get at all those things said that you never dared say--or never even knew till then. And you don't say these things because it will do any good to say them: you know better than that. You say them for their own sake; you say them because you learn a lot from them.

In melodrama, you argue and struggle in the hope of escape. That is vulgar; it's practical. but in tragedy, where there is no temptation to try to escape, argument is gratuitous; it's kingly.

I thought it would be a good point for my 8000th post.

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Well, that was dark, now for a bit of a pick me up: