Voices of Change – A Sound Collage

Throughout the 11 month process of creating my upcoming mix for IPaintMyMind I had plenty of ideas for the mix that were eventually dropped. One thing I thought in particular that would have made it was a little sound collage idea I used in a live setting a few years ago at an art show. At that show I simply let a speech from George W. Bush about the lead up to the Iraq War and Obama’s announcement of more troops being sent to Afghanistan play together. The effect, in a far more simplistic way, is in the spirit of the sound collages of Brion Gysin.

When trying to put this into my already very layered IPMM Mix, I realized that the constant applause points for Bush’s speech to Congress were too distracting, so I went back and (quickly) cut out the applause points from Bush’s speech and started recording the two speeches together to use as a track in the mix. Obama’s speech, before a military crowd, only had one applause point and I didn’t realize it was there until I the two speeches had been going for a while, but it seemed to fit just fine.

In fact, the only reason I’m posting this audio file is that a lot of points in the two speeches seemed to “fit” and what is said by those fits is something I will leave up to the listener to think about. This definitely isn’t something I expect most people to listen to for more than a minute or two. And it’s not something that will have any meaning if you try to listen to it while doing other things or in a distracting setting.

But for the few people that do take the time to listen to these speeches together will hear some cool things happening… in the spirit of Gysin’s famous theory that, “when you cut into the present, the future leaks out” I urge the dedicated listener to pay attention to how these two speeches interact with each other, and what greater insights might be gained from spotting those interactions.