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.
If 666 is the number of the beast (as proclaimed by Iron Maiden nearly four decades ago), then 333 is … what? The number of half a beast? What diabolical acts would half a devil be capable of doing? No, there must another formula at work.
Suss Müsik has been fighting technology lately. This might due to the fact that much of Suss Müsik’s recording equipment dates from the Paleolithic Era. “One persistent dark side of industrialization,” said Jaron Lanier “is that any skill, no matter how difficult to acquire, can become obsolete when the machines improve.” A computer is half a devil.
If Vladimir Nabokov were writing Bend Sinister today, the novel’s setting might be a dystopian landscape in which ethics are established by computers. “At every given level of world-time,” he wrote, “there [is] a certain computable amount of human consciousness distributed throughout the population.” In this futuristic scenario, we might imagine the moral code to be limited by the boundary of storage space. Good behavior would be shared among millions as a precious commodity, passed from one person to another depending on available RAM and disk space.
Perhaps one becomes “half-evil” because there simply isn’t enough good to go around. By the same logic, however, it might be possible to suppress the half-evil from reaching full maturity. We can only hope.
For this creepy piece, Suss Müsik constructed an array of percussive, mechanical loops using two Moog synthesizers. These were rotated in half-measures while a prepared piano was recorded through two reverb pedals. The fake strings and pounding bass drum create the necessary dramatics, while two vocal tracks are refactored using the same Moog settings. The length of the piece is exactly 3’33”.
The piece is titled Padukgrad, named after the fictitious city in Nabokov’s novel. The image is taken from a t-shirt graphic designed by a friend of Suss Müsik.