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Format: CD Label & Cat.Number: Unfathomless U85 Release Year: 2024 Price (incl. 19% VAT): €14.00 More Infohttps://unfathomless.bandcamp.com/album/i-throw-the-switch-on-the-midnight-snake[ante-scriptum/preface by Lucas Schleicher, June 2024, Buffalo, NY] The first time I read Zeno of Elea’s paradox of motion, my only response was disbelief. I stood up, walked across the room, and, faster than any tortoise could manage, picked another book from my bag. If motion is an illusion, I thought, it’s a tangible one, and I have to contend with its details even if I am deluded about them. Zeno’s example of the arrow that never moves doesn’t keep an arrow from anyone’s chest and I am always more tired after running a mile than I am walking down the street for a coffee. I was more than a little arrogant. Years later, after my temperament cooled, I found myself appreciating Zeno more. His argument hadn’t become any more convincing, but the responses he had elicited from other philosophers and mathematicians made the world seem even stranger and more fantastic than the frozen one he had tried to defend. What if, in order to solve Zeno’s paradoxes, we have to accept that time is indivisible? What if, therefore, motion cannot be incrementally examined? What if space itself makes no sense in discrete chunks? Listening now to Christopher McFall’s work, I’m reminded of these perplexing theories and I have the good fortune to wonder alongside him at the bottomlessness of space and time. McFall’s music is haunted by both. Music and time are inseparable in a trivial sense, but I Throw The Switch On The Midnight Snake accentuates the way time moves through a place, like a ball through the air. It is composed of minutes and seconds, but its subject matter is measured in eons. Even when familiar sounds roll to the surface and evoke photographic sensations, the effect of McFall’s arrangements dilates them so that they encompass the long parade of trains, cars, cattle, money, and people that passed through the East and West Bottoms of Kansas City, Missouri yesterday and 50,000 yesterdays ago. His subjects congregate together in a subterranean hum that percolates with memories and signs of World War 2, abandoned stock yards, distilleries, electric promenades, and flooded rivers; with the sound of insects, the reverberation of concrete tunnels, and the biting clank of steel on steel. The resonance of the industrial world echoes through his work, and so does something more personal. An active listener might hear a repetition of the home they grew up in, or stories their family told them about moving to a new place, or even the sound of a loved one’s voice. Listening to the album now, I can’t help but smell my grandfather’s workshop at night; the oil he used to polish his tools and the kerosene lingering in his collection of globe lanterns are as present to me at 42 as they were at 12. The connection is unintentional, but it’s buried in the layers of architecture, geology, history, industry, and technology that lie undivided in our collective memories and private lives. McFall digs into the refuse of Kansas City’s past and a thousand miles east I’m reminded of a clothbound book filled with photos of Native American art sitting on an old wooden desk covered with brass keys and paper. Movement is real, and it happens even when our bodies are at rest. For the consequences of Zeno’s paradoxes to be true, for motion and change to be errors of the mind, our power to stop and segment the world must be real. I must be able to examine this street in this country in this hemisphere, at this minute and second, with the stars at fixed points in the sky, and analyze its every detail accurately. I must be able to break time into its smallest parts, order it in a logical sequence, and use that arrangement of events to predict what will come next. There is a sense in which I have to stand outside the world in order to master it. I Throw The Switch On The Midnight Snake neither succumbs to nor encourages such delusions. Instead, McFall’s music points to the power of memory and the uninterrupted present in our understanding of place and time. We move through our lives because we are swept up in eternity, and some of our most precious comforts come in meeting others who have been carried away too, but still found peace in the flow. Zeno was wrong. Motion isn’t an illusion, but time is, and the life we encounter is always with us now, even when it has disappeared over the horizon. McFall heard its movements in Kansas City. Wherever you might be, you can hear it too. Listen. ~ "I Throw The Switch On The Midnight Snake" was created from field recordings captured along several train lines that transverse the Kansas City East Bottoms, Missouri, USA. These particular locations are unique because some of the trains routed through these areas make temporary stops to change conductors and/or conduct maintenance operations. Others, however, pass by uninterrupted and continue down the rails at full-speed. In this instance, the velocity of each train is notably distinct along with the character of sounds that accompany it, which makes these locations ideal for procuring a great range of recording content. I feel like the release captures what I'm wanting to say, in and of itself. Everyone will experience it in different ways, in their own minds. Maybe the entire process defers to the need for escapism. (Christopher McFall, June/July 2024) credits released July 29, 2024 LOCATIONS : East and West Bottoms of Kansas City, USA. This work consists of layered and manipulated field recordings taken from several train yards and sourced between the Fall of 2023 and Spring of 2024. These works are in loving memory of the composer H. Stewart. May God and peace be with her, as she is greatly missed. Cover, card design + treatments by Daniel Crokaert. Based exclusively on photos by Christopher McFall. |
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