Get all 7 The Change Music Variety Show releases available on Bandcamp and save 50%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Synthaphonics, At the Periphery of Foam, Strings Unstrung, Into the Turn, From Now to Then, Diminished Fifths, and Dreams and Sleep and.
1. |
Dreamlike Sleep
16:47
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A tiny mew, a roman orator lifts her hands to announce the music, and millions of frequencies climb. Chaos ensues immediately. A chorus behind whines furiously against despair, unknowingly increasing it. A kitten washes a paw and stumbles groggily to her feet. The clockwork lurches of the sleep system pound out a simulacrum of sleep, and hopeful echoes retreat in vain. A foundation of storm stirs wrathfully under, and the alarms finally sound. It all gets more dramatic, and clockworks appear to induce a mechanical sleep. A kitten washes herself in the sun. We have bubbles popping furiously. Structure breaks out, irritated by the noise. Fanfares sweep the bitter sky, and a squadron of flying buttresses echo ever-outward over the glistening seas.
9m. The new clean frenzy shifts the soundscape to frantic, hollering and clambering sounds gone crazy skyward, and lifted up by horns. You can’t help but notice when they falter, and then turn sour, until, interrupted one time too many by strings, a long and urgent message begins to unwind in a foreign tongue with a different syntax, ending with a flourish as long sad bells intone overhead.
12m. The next movement starts like an ending, and sleep becomes even more evocative of dream than of respite. Clockworks won’t help you now. A cowardly villain wheezes behind the clocks, and then expires. Clockworks multiply until they resemble bubbles, and as the last few spheres ascend into the deep sea dark, an alarm arises from afar. It climbs in a crescendo of urgency, whines downward a few times, fading into echoes, as the sunglassed masses arrive over the white-hot sidewalks of global warming summer, demanding action.
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2. |
Rough Snoozes
16:20
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In the name of all any man holds holy it begins, hysterically claiming idols, relics, souvenirs, and suchlike time-locked savagery. A high keening sweeps upward and over, and long lean notes start to float. We hear an orbit decay, gravity weakening, wobbling, as fuzz washes over the wreckage, our own spin never ceasing.
3m. Graduation time engenders a frenzied outpouring of talent repressed, ideas spewing sloppily all over the place. A firehose of unbridled melody escapes, and slithers into a mysterious forest of tiny high tunes.
6m. Ghost baby returns, with a tinkling message. Urgency rules the tense and crowded space. A swing-time mechanism begins to spit and snort, taking over everything. A fiery curtain begins a slow but inescapable descent.
9m. It seems to swim, and mechanisms maintain a mindless refrain as everything goes under a simple series of notes that never hurries, and ever changes. Lightning flutters cross the sky. High rings of ancient beings sing silver choruses.
12m. The frog pond, filled with mechanical reproductions, pops up, and an editor, irritated and mean, begins swinging a shining scythe through the endless messes engendered by mechanical worlds. A cooling breeze pops up, followed by a few skittering glam-dolls. Left alone to chat, they begin a escalating chorus of slut-shaming catcalls amongst themselves, laughing and cackling at the fun.
15m. Higher powers remonstrate in chorus after chorus of celestial criticism, going higher, lingering in a dream, and cheeping sleepily behind the swoops.
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3. |
Long Layered Dream
17:41
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A screw grinds up into a shriek of chaotic dispersals, a shimmer comes up behind, other legato sounds writhe into the scene, an alarm complains, a piano tinkles up past it’s pitch, the landscape fades and returns, until dozens of spinning glyphs circle in a vast, uncertain valley.
3m. The hoses, thumbed just right, squeeze out fanlike jets that blow away the chaos, spraying until puddles splash and rush oval outward, cleaning the dirt and the glitter alike. Back out in the great basin, multicolor glyphs drift like pollen, like gnats, like protozoic confections.
6m. The plaintive question of a single shuddering soundwave opens up to a spinning starlike center of sound, that dissolves into particles thrust hither and yon in the name of quantum physics. Ghosts descend like gears tolling bells.
9m. Things turn dramatic and altogether suspenseful, and we start to wonder how this arpeggio will finally come out. The arpeggio winds up quickly, into a hysteria that dissolves in giggles. The photon brigade marches stately back and forth. Things clear to a revolving glyph swimming slowly across the Utah skies.
12m. Something once hidden surges up, the sun hides low in the sky, and a cloud of spinning glyphs dares you to pretend it isn’t there. The drifting protozoic confections float imperturbably past the cloud, until they pass over their dedicated terrain. A single shining glyph shows it self, the chatter evaporates, and things get songlike.
15m. The song shoots upward, and the gears come tumbling in. The protozoic horde comes surging back in the distance, leaving us gazing through time at faraway photons just now gracing us with their fields. A river of glowing glyphs wanders under, frequencies wax and wane, tinkles silence, faraway tones fade into an endless existence outside of this frame.
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4. |
Snap Nap
12:30
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Get ready for a snap nap, body trap, daylight wrapped, wires strapped, until the urgency of these alpha waves get slapped by ringing, happy nods of sleep. It starts to swing, as the regimented pops continue out back, then the super-fast sawing of the singing insectile chorus goes higher and swings a bit faster, then fades to a temple garden of peace gone frantic with competing soothing gongs.
3m. The sirens sing into echoing chain link networks of sound, punctuated by bells once again. Now the bright energetic nourishment of a nap steps up, and fades to a singular sequence of soapsuds and phone tones.
5m. The crowd marches in, ready to start a labor movement of frequencies, until a calming hand, steady on the bells, begins a frantic tappity tong. The wires get crossed, the wind whips through, the cloud of glyphs revolves between, until a non-sequential, wandering, whistle of a dream goes over it all without ceasing, like a flapper fixing her hair. A deliberate random beatless insistence appears.
9m. Everything comes to a head, and then we hear a display of different motifs, one after the other, as if walking from door to door. Eventually a more subterranean theme emerges, and the background swells in opposition. Then urgency begins, the notes flash by, trapped, rhythmic, caged, ending when the world without finally punctuates the terror with ringing, happy nods of wakefulness.
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5. |
First Dreams Recapped
24:21
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A dissonant chorus sighs, a tumbling arpeggio falls, the wind of harmony howls, and the soup of sound goes round and round, trembling with overlapping notes. A shimmer flutters up and switches swish, joining us on the tilting halo ride. Like a childhood nightmare, a whale gapes to swallow us whole while fear wails ineffectually into the chasm. Once within, we are regurgitated back, demonstrating the reversibility of childhood fear. Things start to clear,
5m. The clearing is shorn by a distant waterfall, fraying into drops, into molecules, into protons. Science asserts itself and rotates hoops to prove new theories, until overwhelmed by the voice of ignorance in primitive song. All the themes pop up at once, selfishly over-talking each other, while the brainless rejection of the certainty of science continues, and blooms into prominence. On these frosty dark ages of capitalistic conquest we stare in shock out into the barren and frosty glow. Snowflakes tumble, and chaos ejaculates tentatively onto the icy crust.
10m. But the collective is too strong to stay down long, kicking up their heels in unison, and looking with confusion at some modern clean-swept, domestic future. The insistence throbs in a primitive beat, until surrendering to those pitiful last dry pumps of almost nothing but desire. Rubbed back up and saturated by chaotic chatter, the stroke of the random melody builds into something resembling progress in song. When it stops, a bubbling cauldron of crude oil bubbles up, and a fetid wisp of odor wafts up from the belching mess. We’re crowded with sound.
15m. The halo keeps spinning and tilting, and lands into a clearer vision of domestic bliss, slowed slightly from the long journey it took from the future into your palm. Tones drop in regular patterns into the mix, everything collapses beautifully, then stays, and squirting particles intrude from either side. Rainy days slide by, inside the iron-clad corporate window. We continue to wrestle with the devil, with the ladder, with the onslaught of fakery and betrayal. It makes life easy for some.
20m. That complaining whine reminds us that it’s all about the golden ring, as glyphs marshall themselves into giddy circles. The merry-go-round is just a launchpad for a frantic frolic through the soundwaves, as we gaze upward only, hoping to glimpse the ring where it could never be. The glyphs gather, a crescendo descends, faraway patterns plunge and climb, until everything else simply ceases to keep us from sleep.
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The Change Music Variety Show St Louis, Missouri
Performing and recording Change Music in Saint Louis since 1977.
The Change Music Variety Show recommends:
One of the finest rock albums from our town, mordant wit, crunchy guitars, driving beats, punk depth and - yes - Junior College Philosophy.
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Fully Attractive
by Tight Pants Syndrome
St. Louis' premier vocal group for at least a decade now. Pure pop fun!
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