VI by closing.

Purity isn’t real.

It is a concept concocted as a means of implying truth. But even in the cleanest water there are mineral deposits. in the most crisp photograph there is grain and in the most direct sound there are artifacts. Of the environment, of the presence of the person recording and of the medium itself.

I kept coming back to that thought while working on VI. I’ve found that thinking i have a clear idea of what a project is or that i have a 'pure' vision for connecting sounds together is a perfect way to find myself in entirely different territory upon completion of that same project.

This is a composition of field recordings transferred to cassette tape with varying degrees of compression and saturation mechanically slowed to a hissing crawl. The intent was to illustrate the feeling of suspended animation as a sense of home while spending so much time away from my own. To compose the pattern of a single day out of fragments clipped from months worth of them. Whether or not it achieved its originally intended goal became irrelevant over time. Highly disparate sounds overlapped naturally and blended into one another at slower than half speed. Is that the dry, screeching, rigging grid of the greek theater in Berkeley California or a fervent canopy of birds howling in a Tulum park? It doesn’t matter, they are smearings of sound now. For as much as i wanted to map out a narrative with closing VI the project always seems to come back to being a crooked, soiled canvas for the listener to broadcast their own experience upon.

(Patrick Scott, July 2025)

a thematic ltd series focusing primarily on phonographies reflecting the spirit of a specific place crowded with memories, its aura & resonances and our intimate interaction with it…

unfathomless.net
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