Two friends with the same album…
…are the clues here? This is why this album is good on vinyl, imagine trying to read and decode these esoteric messages in the gatefold on a CD!
Start with the crimes…
Three specific events are mentioned in the first part of the piece. Younger listeners (if we have any), can be excused for not knowing exactly what happened at some of them, so here’s a brief guide
The My Lai massacre is known in Vietnam as the Son My Massacre.
The Kent State Shootings.
The murder of Sharon Tate.
Text and additional sources.
The piece uses a very wide variety of text, some of it easier to find than others…
The poem itself is printed on the inside of the album.
Even the words that open the album proved impossible to track down, but this is curious...
Soren Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the Individual and the Crowd.
The Scriabin etude that is quoted during the “Crowd sequence.
Freddie Hubbard appears on Gav’s idea of a perfect Album.
Samplings.
I only found two examples of samples lifted from the album, but I suspect that there must be more.
Dilated Peoples - End of time. (1995)
Omid (featuring Global Phlowtations) - Suberranean Service (1998)
Similar Projects…
If you take the basic premise, improvising soloist, recitation, bits of text from different sources, a live orchestra, electronics…turns out that Gav has seen a couple of these in his time…
This was a project in the Banlieu of Paris in and around an apartment block that was going to be blown up on the final day, hence the title Big Bang. The festival, I am glad to report, seems to be still going on. The piece is based on Emil Zola’s letter J’accuse, and involves an actor, an electronics guy in a dug out flowerbed, and a wind band. A vocal soloist and a trumpet player are roaming around the set, looking for trouble. The back of my head turns up at 53 minutes.
This short clip doesn’t really do the whole piece justice.
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Sing Me A Song Of Songmy