memento mori

mementomori

‘One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in [recording] is its close association with death... The dead flower, once alive, is the psychic equivalent of the verbal text. The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the [sound], its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living [listeners].’
—Walter J. Ong

Memento Mori is a cassette specific composition that explores death through the disembodiment caused by the recording media, ‘schizophonia’.
The piece is itself a memento mori of the cassette tape as a medium and at the same time of its own content, which was mutilated and molded and which may still be replaced by a new recording which will mark its death like an epitaph.
The piece is a cycle in between the two sections of a trip from Above Air to Below Ground: on the first part, Above Air, there is a crescendo from the earth into an aerial state of trance and then down to the limbo between human and divine, with the sound of the Muslim call to the sacred rituals. The second part, Below Ground, begins with a crescendo that gets broken suddenly to give way to an immersive and chaotic mass of noise, an underworld that gets also broken into a cold silent tension of squeaking saxophones that resemble moribund creatures, and then a crescendo of frenzy builds up again as a runaway from death and is again suddenly killed with silence.