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scree​/​n

by Polyorchard

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1.
scree/n 01:20:00

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Physical copies still available from Tripticks Tapes
triptickstapes.bandcamp.com/album/scree-n


Polyorchard is:

Jeb Bishop
Olie Brice
Seán Clancy
D. Edward Davis
Laurent Estoppey
Chris Eubank
David Grubbs
Michael Thomas Jackson
David Jordan
David Menestres
Catherine Sikora

Composition & construction by David Menestres

Mastering by Andrew Weathers

Art by Graham Sefton

Layout design by Haley Aronow

Tripticks Tapes (030)

Notes by Christina Carter:
Perhaps I’m in a pessimistic mood right now but immediately upon listening to scree/n I thought of the end. I thought, well maybe we’ve come to the end of thinking of the end in a certain way. We were sure there was no end, not an end in any way relevant to creatures alive now or alive within any time frame that we can understand because even though the planet will explode and burn in 4 billion years, that might as well be infinity to us. This is what I was told in an environmental science class. But then we came to know that there is a very close end to the way that plants and animals live now, very close in that we can conceive of it within an understandable span of time. But when I was listening, it occurred to me that there are also many ends coming including an end to being able to understand the end that it is probably here right now. I then began thinking about power technology. How we have to use it. How we will probably have to use it past many of the ends. And then I began thinking about how it’s been the hottest it’s ever been here. It’s so hot that even walking or sitting outside is not something to do if you can help it. Then I began thinking about being inside. Inside in the house and inside of this music. I cannot say anything at all about it in a way that uses music theory or even just regular music language, that which musicians use to talk about notes or scales or whatever. All I can do is describe how beginning in early 2019, I started thinking about hiding, having to hide. A calamity coming. And how people had survived in the past, the people who had survived that is. And the sound of my mind while thinking about hiding while lying in the dark on a mattress close to the ground was like this unfolding of certainty amidst uncertainty. This was a real feeling. A feeling I’ve known all my life. Confounding. It doesn’t always end how or where or when you think it is going to end, even if sometimes it does. And I remember thinking about how once when I was a child I thought I was trapped in time between 11:59 and midnight because I didn’t want it to become midnight. And how horrible a fear it was that I had possibly made myself remain there forever. But of course that isn’t what happened. It turned midnight. And I got older and older and got to here. It is 1 AM. It’s gotten quieter. Right now there is a saxophone. Right now there is a voice. Right now there is a guitar. There is the sound of electricity. Something conducting the electricity so it makes a sound that we can hear that is electronic, a proposition. It sounds like a rattlesnake, even though I’ve never heard or seen a rattlesnake before, alerting me to its presence, not hiding. Warning. Or maybe just playing, living. But that is what I’m thinking about now. When I was thinking about it before, I remember wondering if the piece was somehow all played by one person. Or one person was somehow causing all of the sounds. Causing them to move in a certain direction, with a certain strange unity of purpose while seemingly also difficult to ascertain what the larger plan or structure is really all about. And as the piece moves forward, it becomes even more commanding of my attention, the flow making me forget about thinking about so many other things or so many questions or concepts and then I know it has me completely. And I will listen to the end. There is more space and silence towards the end. And bowing. It’s beautiful, I think, like a fleeting, breathing lullaby turned electrical storm.


Words by David Menestres:
It starts like all things with the breath, a gasping trickle of water that winds its way though the local gravity well, slowly tumbling bit rotted grains of nothingness.

It ends with the vocoded alluvial flats chanting names of trees from a hundred year old book with a Cassandra complex.

In between: beats programmed by an obsessed Milford Graves, Wandelweiser, & Pan Sonic fan; shards of ray guns & rocket ships, vocal squalls & slivers of sound poetry, drums tossed down stairs & trombones altered beyond their creator's recognition; a guitar & a double bass; assorted aftershocks of half forgotten dreams.

The score for scree/n consists of 160 screenshots of the clock that Android 12 forced on to lock screens. Information provided on said screenshots: the time, the date, the current weather, remaining battery charge, wifi status, and the image of a ridge line in Diablo Canyon with the sun just edging over, a remnant of a mis-remembered past.

One could probably go on about the technocracy and the eternal disappointment that is the commercialized internet of 2023 (including the corporate overlords of the corporate overlords of this site). One could probably go on about the meaning of those trees as an expression of the never ending destruction of our planet (your listening to this music and our creation of it only compounds this problem). One could go on about the intersection of Fluxus, Dada, and jazz with the memory of what those things never meant. One could go on endlessly about everything, but mostly you should press play, turn it up, and ignore everything else, including me, for the next 80 minutes.

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released January 27, 2023

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Polyorchard Durham, North Carolina

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