Recording: Rub Out The Word

Artist: The Penny Arcade Peep Show [text by William S. Burroughs] + Cut Up Stew

Songs:

Recorded at Dundas Video (Track Could Bend #9), December 1, 2015.

Rub Out The Word - The Penny Arcade Peep Show

Rub Out The Word - Cut Up Stew

When it made its debut, Glen Hall's Rub Out Out the Word project – conceptualized as a centenary tribute to William S. Burroughs — was a large-scale affair, with an eight-piece band and live-mixed visuals. This electroacoustic version stripped things down, with Hall on laptop and sax joined by Matt Miller (laptop + MIDI keyb) and Ted Phillips (cataRT synthesis) — plus the presence of Burroughs represented by Ron Gaskin's narration, facing the musicians as if subject to some sort of bureaucratic tribunal.

This gave a lot of different ways to cut up and reintegrate the source material, from the spoken word heard here in "Penny Arcade", to a immersive sound-trip to a Moroccan marketplace to the cut-up stew that shows the band's musical talents. (On the latter piece, Phillips' cataRT is responding in realtime to the other musicians by drawing from a collection of microsamples that include some Burroughs mutters as well as a few fragments of "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" and some shortwave noises.)

[The next Track Could Bend will be at Dundas Video on Tuesday, January 5th — more info coming soon!]