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Again on vinyl records,
the brief for this project, as with Ostracism On Principal Thoroughfare,
came back to flexi discs, though this time with the accent on the spoken
word, of which Skit and I had no examples whatsoever. Good start, we
thought. However, we were keen to take up every musique concrète invitation
we got at the time, and as luck would have it, the internet is a wonderful
source of the obscure. Plus, we'd also put together what, in my humble
opinion, is one of our best ever pieces of artwork
to accompany whatever we came up with (though we later changed it to the
above more relevant one), so there was no way we were missing
out! All we had to do was look for another of those strange and pointless
"watch me putting a flexi disc
on my record player and pressing play" videos on You Tube. Yup, there were
one or two. The one that particularly caught our interest was a rather
cheesily acted and narrated American Easter story disc. We'd never
seen one like that over here, I dare say they do exist, but England doesn't
really have a 'Bible belt' as such, we just have Cliff Richard instead.
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"It was Friday evening," the
tale begins flatly, they really should have got Rod Serling, "Jesus had just
died on the cross."
"Grim start." Skit muttered.
"Spoilers," I replied, "it's a
happy ending, he'll be back after the weekend."
Starting with the speech quiet
enough to force the listener's attention, we set out to build a soundscape
with the natural background noise of the stylus on the flexi, then began to
raise the volume gradually throughout. The more you hear the message, the
louder it gets / the more annoying it gets (*delete as applicable). Look,
religious beliefs are very much a personal choice, it's not for us to
tell anyone what to think, but that goes both ways, okay? This is a piece of
musique concrète, it is what it is, that's all it is. Nuff
said. There were also some other bits of the dialogue that appealed to us,
not least being some perfect apple-pie child saying "He was so wonderful."
To be fair, I'm sure we'll say the same about Cliff after he's gone, and he
had more hit records...
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