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01. BURNT FRIEDMAN & DANIEL DODD-ELLIS - Testmaze
02. BURNT FRIEDMAN & DANIEL DODD-ELLIS - Skies Okay Blue
03. BURNT FRIEDMAN & DANIEL DODD-ELLIS - Inward Sun
04. BURNT FRIEDMAN & DANIEL DODD-ELLIS - Cease to Matter
05. BURNT FRIEDMAN & DANIEL DODD-ELLIS - Boundary Loss
06. BURNT FRIEDMAN & DANIEL DODD-ELLIS - Cycles
07. BURNT FRIEDMAN & DANIEL DODD-ELLIS - Kidney One
08. BURNT FRIEDMAN & DANIEL DODD-ELLIS - On Her Plate
09. BURNT FRIEDMAN & DANIEL DODD-ELLIS - Cease to Matter 2
10. BURNT FRIEDMAN & DANIEL DODD-ELLIS - Inward Sun 2 (CD-only)
11. BURNT FRIEDMAN & DANIEL DODD-ELLIS - Silberne Libelle (CD-only)
ARTIST
TITLE
Cease to Matter
FORMAT
CD

LABEL
CATALOG #
NON 038CD NON 038CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
10/28/2014

The impact of these eleven sound poems, or poetry tracks, derives less from intentional meaning and symbolism than from fortuitous coincidences, cut-ups, and flashes of inspiration in the course of handling the audio material. Rather than a composed narrative, the tracks reflect the inner reality of the authors Burnt Friedman and Daniel Dodd-Ellis. Moods and impressions from B. Friedman's Sub-Saharan concert tour in 2013 as well as fragments of memories of an imaginary future fuse together in the music and text of all eleven tracks. These responses to real-life "kpafuca" ("things falling apart") -- conditions in African metropolises -- collapse into grooves and phrases reminiscent of Chris Marker's sci-fi apocalypticism (La Jette, Sans Soleil). This polyphony of non-places also includes the spirit of sound explorers such as the musical-ethnological practitioners Hartmut Geerken and Roman Bunka (Embryo), whose visions and musical activities refuse to succumb to reductionist and essentialist staging. In Cease to Matter, Friedman intuitively pits the liberating power of noise, of über-mensch-maschinen music, against those cultural landscapes repeatedly automatically inscribed into music. Odd beats and random technical defects -- that is to say, disobedience -- are pitted against the normative interpretational supremacy of musical world maps. The voice of Daniel Dodd-Ellis, a Berlin-based performer and vocalist from Texas, was first heard on Burnt Friedman's 2007 album First Night Forever. The lyrics stem from both artists and were cut-up and re-assembled several times over by Friedman during production in 2013 and 2014. The line "Skies are blue inside of you" comes from Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, which appeared in 1932. Tracks 04 and 09 ("Cease to Matter") contain a piano sample edit based on a composition by Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1872-1949).