Label: CTI Format: CD
Based on Cosey Fanni Tutti‘s inital live Selflessness action at Disneyland in California in May 2002, EAR Four aims to transmit her feelings of disorientation and being placed apart from of time the resort engendered. Remixed mainly from recordings made on site and and then broadcast precisely one year later on Resonance FM in London, the CD has had four minutes of unaltered environmental sound removed for time and copyright reasons but is otherwise the same as the radio session.
William Gibson famously compared Singapore’s authoritarian cybernetic city-state to “Disneyland with the death penalty” – Cosey recasts the latter here as a place adrift from time and space, a resort cum city-state so separated from the generality of mundane existence that any consequent felony would be one of the mind. The overall sensation generated by Selflessness is of a seeming sentence of indefinite and indistinct duration executed as an appropriate punishment to fit a thought crime so obscured by the application of socio-cultural mind control that it is no longer possible to conceive of the state in which disobeying is even available as a concept, let alone an option.
Structured in four more or less evenly-timed parts, Selflessness shuffles and sidles from ear to EAR, with washes and slews of hyper-processed sounds rolling past with disconcerting use of echo to further dissolve their origins. Words and perhaps conversations are there, but what they might have been saying would be well beyond the most capable of voice analysis software to decipher – and the same goes for the source material in its entirity. The resulting drones and tones have a strangely choral feeling to them, and on many occasions the term ethereal doesn’t seem an unworkable adjective to apply to the curiously lovely sweeps which shimmy and fade like the passing tides.
There are fragmentary rhythms emergent on Part Three, dull intonations flecked with sparing glitch and delay in echoing semi-Dubs through hallucinatory auditory constrictions which open out into the relative freedom (from motion and time at least) which blankness provides. Childlike vocalisations urge indecipherable moods which hint at discontent, lilting out of the electronic fog in which Cosey has draped this artificial consumer-friendly pop culture utopia. Part Four drips with liquid rhythms and floats on electronic airs so uplifting the listener’s arms may rise up of their own accord while immersed in the stuttering swatches of a tonal colour scheme which eventually secedes to disguised utterances muttering encoded imprecations. Whatever their actual speech was, their final message rises out of the unsettling dislocating experience as a pointer to the apparently real audio world beyond. Perhaps they were pleading for freedom; or more worryingly still, expressing satisfaction.
-Linus Tossio-
