the piece started from the skrtchy_lazy loop, a small snippet taken from a sound file with an end-of-file error, which allowed the wave editor i was using to render as sound adjacent fragments of other files (i suspect these noises are what corrupted some irreplaceable files). it had such a melody that it transported me somewhere far away and lonely, and the mood of the piece was solidified. it brought to mind the sound of rustling of clothes and bumping of a mic, and a calling out to another person at the speaker's end, the voice almost out of range of the mic. so i had to seek to create that, and the mood that fit called for a father giving recorded advice to his son whom he's missed seeing off for the last time, trying to impart a lifetime of wisdom in thirty seconds of warbly tape. i improvised the speech, pitched it higher, and finally ran it with itself backwards to obscure it a little more. the other notable sample from the first part (the message part of the piece) is a sample from noise21, a much earlier piece i recorded under the name 'anleth.' it has been a favorite of my older brother's and the sample i used is a corrupted mp3 conversion of that piece from back before your computer just came with an mp3 converter. it's almost completely obscured by compression artifacts, and it's significance as a piece of family lore and its utter degradation through the failed conversion fit the mood perfectly as well, and so it figures into the message portion as an abstraction of the speech. the second part is the digestion portion, as the listener, presumably the intended receiver of the message, rides the wave of feelings produced by the message. i tried to convey this with a forlorn improvised melody that i throat-sang, pitched down two octaves, and ran through a lot of distortion.
