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.
“So what hovers along with the general unhappiness of everybody with things as they are?”
That quote is by the American poet Robin Blaser, spoken as part of his July 1992 lecture on the nature of belief and doubt in politics. You can listen to the entire digital transcript at the Naropa Poetics Audio Archive.
“Inside that sense we may positively read the future,” Blaser continues. “And as a consequence [humankind] becomes one of the pieces of the puzzle … to try to make a difference.”
Suss Müsik finds this idea both relevant and fascinating. One almost imagines current events operating as a sociocultural trompe l’oeil, a layer of ornamental unrest necessitating our advancement as a kinder, more empathetic species. One hopes so, anyway.
Suss Müsik original’s attempt was to translate the cadence of Blaser’s voice into notation, something like Steve Reich’s excellent Different Trains. Suss Müsik is not Steve Reich, however, and what you hear are various sonic fragments in major pentatonic scale played on fake strings and woodwinds. One of these fragments comprised a four-chord piano phrase, which marks the transition to a synthetic wash approximating the same cadence.
Suss Müsik was struck not only by the content and inflection of Blaser’s sentence, but also the raspy quality of his voice — cavalier, droll, almost indifferent to the importance of his question. For this reason, Suss Müsik accepts Disquiet Junto demerits for including it in the final piece.
The piece is titled Atrococo, a mashup of the words atrocity and rococo. The image is an overlay of Suss Müsik’s attempt to map Blaser’s sentence to some form of notation.