PURPOSE

My visual art practice has been shifting away from formal abstraction toward narrative autobiography / autoethnography, representation, and affect. Songwriting feels like the most direct way of taking this rabbit hole of aestheticized identity even further. The two have coexisted for decades, weaving in and out of each other, informing and deforming. Even though they might operate at different levels and have different creative functions, they emanate from the same source. This album, as a compliment to my thesis exhibition, is a concerted effort to acknowledge that source. To reach a broader audience I want this thesis to be accessible in multiple ways. Someone who might struggle to engage with reading a paper could better understand my visual art practice by listening to the songs. The written word has its limits. Music allows access that isn’t literal, linguistic, or didactic.

ETYMOLOGY

thesisyphus is portmanteau of the words thesis and Sisyphus.

Two definitions for thesis are:

1. a statement or theory that is put forward as a premise to be maintained or proved.
2. a long essay or dissertation involving personal research, written by a candidate for a college degree.

Etymologically thesis comes via late Latin from the Greek root tithenai – ‘to place (a proposition)’.

Sisyphus was a king of Greek mythology condemned by Zeus to an eternity of laboriously futile repetition for cheating death. His task was to push a boulder up a hill just to have it roll back down before reaching the top, forever. The crime was craft and cleverness, the punishment for this hubris was an eternity of repetitive drudgery in isolation.

While the allusion is a bit dramatic, sometimes the repetitious nature and content of my practice feels Sisyphean. I cycle through the same process over and over again attempting to fix the unfixable, to engineer my way out of grieving – reconciling with the death of my childhood. On the same note, I mythologize my own narratives through art and music, making them permanent even if they were moments in passing. I propose that the perpetuation of this conundrum results from trying to cope with it. It may continue to fold back in on itself until I find my way out. If I see where I came from, where I have been, and where I am through the reflection of a map, perhaps I could visualize an exit strategy.

STRUCTURE

Conceptual structure orders the album. Akin to my visual art objects I group this album into three structural elements – the substrate, the surface, and the support.

The substrate is the foundation or core of a song. It is the embodied experience that becomes a narrative. This usually has a complicated emotional component attached to it. Songwriting allows me to sit with a feeling, so affect is also part of the substrate. I played each song respectively all the way through until I ended up with one continuous good enough track. Six of ten of these songs were written during my three years in graduate school. The other four are older but worked well conceptually. These guitar and voice one-takes function as the substrate. I did not record to a metronome or pitch correct in postproduction, so there are inconsistencies in both. Apart from some dynamic range compression they are unmanipulated and idiosyncratic. These form a kind of undulating topography for the surface.

The surface is what accretes around the substrate – the aesthetic, the readily accessible. These are the various orchestrations that layer over the narrative core. It both enhances and obscures the substrate, concealing some parts and revealing others. These tracks were recorded after and over the initial one-take. They consist of accompanying guitar lines, scratch or percussive guitar, and harmony vocals. They have different reverb than the initial tracks but still no pitch correction. The surface accumulates intuitively and through improvisation. I have developed a musical language over my composing and recording tenure. Like a spoken language, this sonic one has some construction conventions. Like a native speaker, these conventions come naturally, and I don’t think too much about them. Some songs have at least forty additional tracks. One song has zero. Numbers are integral to understanding the support.

The support is a permeable system of personally significant numbers that physically connects individual surfaced fragments, or songs. In the context of this album, it is more discreet than with my visual work. I use the term permeability to describe the tendency to incorporate new numbers as they occur and assign meaning to them. The system is based on a confluence of what is at hand, what can be shifted to fit, and what is constant. This is similar to loose associations that calcify in the echo chamber of conspiratorial thought. I believe it comes from my cooky end-of-days cult background and general discomfort with the unknown or uncontrollable. It is also a convenient way to explain or justify what evades sense. Music is math over time. Rhythm is the most obvious mathematical element, but pitch and pitch intervals are just rhythms or polyrhythms at higher frequencies. Below is a table of frequently used numbers and some of their personal meanings.

The support manifests in this album in two ways, the first being pitch. I tuned the low C note of my guitar (A string third fret) to 238 Hz. 238 is the product of 7 and 34. While I used a capo to change keys between many songs, and the final song is in open E instead of standard tuning, I always tuned that fret to 238 Hz. Temperature change in the recording space, the age of the guitar strings, and my unreliable ear created some slight modulations. The second is the number of individual songs and their respective play times in context with the full length of the album. There are 10 songs in the album with a total run time of 42 minutes. Each song length is cleanly divisible by 7 seconds. 42 minutes, or 2520 seconds is equivalent to 360 7 second intervals. 42 is also the product of 6 and 7 – biblically opposed numbers. Both the number of songs in the album and the total run time in 7 second intervals are full cycles, a doubled body, a circle, an ending. Below is a timetable of the album.

In the end, it comes down to affect. These artifacts are the residue of acting on a deep longing to transform, to transmute, to redeem, and revalue. They are the result of my own reflections on lived experience and how my shape touches and is touched by so many other complex shapes. Everything is complicated, wonderful, terrible, beautiful garbage.