Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.
God: You can never change the future. The past, yes, but not the future.
Lucifer: How do you change the past?
God: Why, the past is always changing—nobody remembers anything. But the future can no more be turned away than the light flowing off the moon.
This bit of dialogue is from Arthur Miller’s underrated play The Creation of the World and Other Business. It comes at a crucial point in the narrative where Lucifer admits to God that he compelled Eve & Adam to partake of the forbidden fruit, an act that ultimately banished God’s children from the Garden of Eden.
Time travel is not impossible; we are always revisiting past events in our efforts to understand the present, and our attempts to predict the future often arise from moments of stagnate contemplation. Anyone who has experienced the feeling of traveling by air or rail understands the dichotomy between moving and not moving, not unlike how a great piece of music rewards the listener’s investment by making time stand still.
For this short piece, Suss Müsik literally went back in time—ten years, to be exact. The source material is an eight-bar guitar phrase played with a Danelectro 12SDC 12-string in 2007. The sample was chopped through a Korg ToneWorks 411X processor and recorded live from a Vox AD30VT. The binaural motion cycles for about two minutes or so before the reverse reverb winds it down, coming almost to a halt. The momentary respite allows for a calming pause before the cymbals announce their arrival.
The piece is entitled Trammel, a word to describe something that restricts or impedes one’s freedom of action.