eleison
“they promised liberty, they promised freedom, but they themselves are slaves”
This is not a religious work. Nor is it an anti-religious work; I have nothing against those who choose genuinely to pursue a faith. ‘eleison’ is a very personal exploration of my own struggles to come to terms with my experiences as a child at the hands of the contemporary Christian church, and to understand whatever it is that I may or may not believe.
As a young person I stood in church hearing that Christ had supposedly come to bring freedom to humankind at a time when the leadership of the synagogues had imposed rule upon rule on top of the already rigid doctrine of Jewish law. But all I could see around me was a group of people that did the very same: exploited the power they held over me, or exercised control, added laws and rules, and became slaves to their own self-imposed strictness. I did not see the liberty or freedom that I had been told of. I did not feel liberty or freedom in myself, only fear of breaking the rules.
While searching for sound sources to accompany ‘eleison’ I came across a recording on archive.org of a Baptist preacher which seemed to embody everything that I had experienced and wished to describe. Listening to his at times compassionate, at times aggressive and even extremist words, I noted that he seemed to tie himself in knots with his own rules. The more I edited, the more I became fascinated and sometimes disturbed by the legalistic tone of his words.
The work is also a setting of the Gregorian Kyrie Eleison, the version I chose from Mass IV a favourite of mine since my early days as a singer. The contrasting true freedom of children playing unhindered on a beach against the fearful strictness of the preacher is accompanied by a voice pleading ‘have mercy’.
Download via Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/irixx/eleison [mp3 / 39MB]
Madonna Remix Project
The full album is available for download at http://www.archive.org/details/wtf_mrp_mp3.
is
‘is’ was featured in issue 12 of Vague Terrain.
The work was created from samples of the replica of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine in the Science Museum, London; the chronometers at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and Enigma machines in Bletchley Park.
At the time I had become fascinated with early machines or devices that were ahead of their time in what they managed to achieve, but were also as much works of art as works of invention. This seems rather lost in our time, as devices are churned out cheaply and efficiently in factories – the home computer may now be available to (nearly) everyone in first world countries, but it would most likely be seen as a waste of time these days to put so much painstaking effort into creating a beautiful machine such as the Difference Engine.
Many thanks to the Science Museum, the Royal Observatory and Bletchley Park for granting permission to sample these “instruments”. My thanks also to Neil Dawson who performed the double bass samples that are woven throughout the track.
http://vagueterrain.net/journal12/irixx/01
Download: http://vagueterrain.net/journal/12/irixx/VT12-irixx.zip [mp3 .zip archive / 85MB]
thioridazine dream
Inspired in part by Janice Galloway’s experimental novel ‘The Trick is To Keep Breathing’, thioridazine dream (2001) is a journey through inner and outer worlds through the eyes of its protagonist, a female character slowly undergoing a breakdown. Through the course of the work, the distortions of her inner consciousness gradually overwhelm and mesh with the outer world until it gradually becomes impossible to determine reality.
thioridazine dream was featured in the RadioPlateaux Public and Private Gallery exhibition.
Download via Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/irixx/thioridazine-dream [mp3 / 59MB]
Click to play or download tracks. All material on this site is released under a Creative Commons Licence.
A note on the choice of licence
I have initially chosen to release the works on this site under an Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike licence. However, if you are a composer and wish to use samples from one of my works, just ask :) as I’m likely to respond positively.