Flavigula

But you are a hologram.

Oh, you can believe that if you wish. It’s all the same to me. In fact, I can easily assume that you are also a hologram.

But I’m not made of well placed patterns of light. I’m made of sinews, various liquids, and a revolting stench which always precedes me.

You got that last part right, at least. Sit down with me. I’ll shut off the idiot-box. IDIOT-BOX. Don’t they call it that where you come from?

I don’t come from anywhere. I was a test tube baby.

I hope you see the contradiction in those two sentences.

You seem unreasonably chipper considering your woman left you for some other surely more pumped hologram.

I’m suppressing it.

Huh. Supressing it? Your words make me think back to a time when I sat in a restaurant / bar somewhere in Texas. A waitress named Samantha worked there. She had a bizarre tattoo on her ankle. I cannot at the moment recall what exactly it was. It was bizarre, however. Truly. Every time I (or one of my companions) would make an absurd comment implying we’d soon do something decidedly shifty, she’d say “Suppress it.”

You see? My presence is already stimulating your memory. Can you give me an example of one of these absurdities?

Yah. For example, I’d say to Samantha - “I have the intense desire to impale that drooling, wheelchaired, obese man on my salad fork.” And she’d say - “Suppress it.”

The creature makes a low grunt.

Or, Acy would state - “I feel the need to slather the mayonaisse from Jason’s burger onto the left leg of my jeans then rip their remaining tatters violently apart, leaving most of the lower half of my body naked and exposing to the clamouring restaurant clientele my uniquely extreme hairiness.” And Samantha would retort - “Suppress it.”

This Acy is not actually exhibiting a part of his personality in this description, but accessing the thread of the situation that surrounds him. Perhaps a better way to put it would be that he is joined with Samantha (and the rest of you) in a synergy. You are a mass of flesh and thought, unseparable. You see, individualism in unique humans does not exist. Only a sequence of a vast array of individuals exist that are contextual in nature. One dies and another is born nearly immediately. These various states of being are conglomerates. Your concept of individual misses that they are actually just one dimensional changelings who morph perpetually as they conjoin and retract.

I wrote The Fen when I was in New Cross Gate. One of its parts was supposed to be played on mandolin, but I never performed it to my satisfaction, the anal retentive twat that I am. I am revisiting it now.

The initial problem with this part, which repeats once, is the attack / volume of the so-called Rhodes. I added phase and distortion to remedy that. Also, before this bit, whilst the dirgelike stomp is going on (and, indeed, before it), I added Hela. Yes, Hela. I took a small clip from a voice message she sent me last month and stretched it to 20 times its length. I then reversed it and mixed the two. The result is eerily beautiful.

Maintaining the same timbre between tracks in LMMS is becoming a problem. Perhaps there are unseen settings that affect parameters manipulated by me over three years ago. Ah! Well, part of this composition will be an injection of aleatoric aesthetics.

Where the fuck is that hissing buzz coming from?

I discovered earlier that Crossover Distortion can be fantastically noisy. I have employed it in the piece.

As I was riding in the pickup truck with my father on the way to the grocery store, I thought of the track that will follow The Fen. The name will be The Bog or possibly Silt. Or even I Swabbed Your Pet Gerbil’s Anus With a Fossilized Paramecium. My idea is this: firstly, layer many tracks of Hela’s voice strectched and contracted, forming chords. If plausible, create some bastardized version of the melody in the introduction of The Fen to swim erratically through the resulting sonic morass. Provide accompaniment consisting of mid-range distorted bass and the aformentioned Crossover Distortion of the pizzicato violin.

Fortunately, a part had been left unwritten. The erstwhile mandolin part of the second “verse” (I laughingly call it that) now exists. The counterpoint to the Rhodes part penned (I laughingly call it that) three and a half years ago contains many fun dissonaces. Only a select few were planned. I leave the rest because it is one of the wondrous features of aleatoric composition.

The final mixdown using Audacity, and as I remember, tends to muddle the sound a bit, although I did a bit of noise reduction, as well, so that may be the culprit. Where, in the name of the pungent liver of Jesus, did that buzzzzzzzzzz come from, anyhow?

The Fen is at this very moment uploading (itself - yes, it is a sentient being - fens are living ecospheres, don’t’cha know, ya leper?) to Soundcloud. I haven’t used Soundcloud for years, so deleted several tracks on the siralfrediv account. I tagged the mixed down flac with the artist Flavigula. My electronic and / or electroacoustic music will be under this moniker. In fact, I should create an entrely new Soundcloud account for these purposes.

Yah.

The Fen