Did you know that collaging a picture is quite boring an activity? All that cutting and pasting, gluing, rearranging. Doing it digitally is even more criminal because doing things digitally is just inherently boring. Making things is boring. I’m writing this on a computer and it is surprisingly boring. But get this: the action is dull (id est „writing”) however thinking about it is not. Right now, I’m thinking about the above record and trying (and retrying) to write some notes that approximately concern it. Wherever these notes land in the hypothetical context ballpark, words will definitely accompany the record since I've arbitrarily decided that they are needed. These are soundless words however, at least until you utter them. Once airborne transmission took place, their entry into the dense sound collage of everyday life becomes irreversible.

One thing I want to get straight: sound collage predates pictorial collage. This is a hard pill to swallow in the age of the Eye and it is an important fact because it really brings home the esoteric incomprehensibility of music. Of sound. Of air. Of breathing. There is nothing indecipherable about a wall you’re looking at or the screen that currently shows this jumble of words – the walls were erected and the monitors were assembled by systems of oppression. You could argue that those systems are present in the sounds herein and you’d be right. However there is a difference between our comfortable lives backed by the broken backs of African miners or the unnervingly and unnaturally unshaken hands of Asians trapped in a sweatshop (amongst others) and their voice. A voice that is part of the mystifying collage already mentioned. A voice seldom heard through the tapestry, appreciated hardly ever, and that sporadic recognition only encompasses the sound that has been transformed into music. If we are unable to see the pain for what it is, let’s hear it then.

This is a serious matter. We are living in not just the age of the Eye, but the age of Collage too. Look at all those memes. Think about not looking at them. Think about not looking at all. Think about a dying shoemaker, but don’t picture it. Think about the feelings of the people whose blood-soaked hands dug up the ores needed in the making of your computer to enjoy this collage of sounds. You saw those hands in your mind’s eye, but not the feelings. See the feelings.

Could you still be able to enjoy this record after all the words? Yes, I think you could. But be critical regarding your enjoyment: there is a shadow that burns.

Raymond Kiss