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Charli3​.​14, by Albert Figurt

from AnthropologyOfSound2022 by AnthropologyOfSound2022

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take an eerie, quite old folk song from 1865 ("The Ship that Never Returned") and revamp it as a bitter ballad about a real train wreck (occurred in 1903, but the country music hit "Wreck of the Old 97" is from 1924) / wait some 25 years, then remodel lyrics & melody of both iterations to forge a mayoral-campaign instant-jingle ("M.T.A.", 1949), limiting the circulating recordings to just a couple (mostly broadcasted via a touring track with a loudspeaker, then fined for "disturbing the piece") / add an additional decade, then release the song once again (and for all), changing some bits 'n' pieces here and there and finally making it both a quintessential Bostonian lore reference and a huge [inter]national success ("Charlie on the MTA" by The Kingston Trio, 1959)

on a side, take a short story about some MTA metaphysical intricacies conceived in 1950 by a Harvard-astronomer-turned-sci-fi-writer ("A subway named Möbius" by A.J. Deutsch), spice it with some postmodern existentialism and/or situationist absurdism along the way ("Take the 'A' train" by Don DeLillo [1962] + the “yo-yo-ing” main character of Thomas Pynchon's debut novel "V." [1963]) and let it rest until 1996 - when an Argentine art film, loosely based on the original take (but strongly alluding to Borges-like paradoxical topologies while also echoing the desaparecidos' nightmare) is released, namely "Moebius" by Gustavo Mosquera

now combine all the song-related ingredients, lay them down on a totally different rhythmical & harmonic crust, intersperse 'em with some textual snippets from the narratological dough + a fair amount of puffing sounds from the actual M[B]TA (as experienced via your occasionally malfunctioning "CharlieCard") and bake everything in GarageBand for approximately 3 minutes and 14 seconds

/// serve endlessly \\\

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from AnthropologyOfSound2022, released April 24, 2022

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