COPYRIGHT
Cthulian & Flight Risk
2021

Watch the Album here: youtu.be/BL1DKq7_L-8

COPYRIGHT accelerates the viewer towards a mnemonic event-horizon. COPYRIGHT seeks
the obliteration of the manacles that are our association to art-cultural cenotaphs. Or rather, it seeks the celebration of our common bondage to cultural fixtures and praises the impossibility of defining the specific element of a song, or moment, that makes it so communally personal. Can you name exactly what it is in that one song that makes you weep for a moment that no one remembers the way you do? COPYRIGHT seeks to fracture that moment into many further singular quasi-realities that we can all use as paths that lead Home.
Do the Sooke Potholes mean anything to you?

The audio in this piece is sourced from covers of songs. These covers were presented by the interpreters in the form of video performances, and so these videos also become sources, that in synchrony with other illustrative elements, interact as a form of oblation to the Computer. COPYRIGHT aims not to interpret the music, but to engage with and amalgamate the emotional attachments of others, accelerating our shared cathexis centrifugally into a pretty
little rhyme.

In examining what transpires in the space between interpretation and forgetting, or interpretation and deeply felt remembering, COPYRIGHT seeks to inspire dissipation of
memory (or recovery of lost memory) in the audience, thereby achieving the psychic equivalent of telling your computer a joke. Impossible asymptotic observational humour that’s just for you. The laughter is somewhere in the past, somewhere in a dream The Righteous Brothers nearly had 60 years ago.

COPYRIGHT scans the cultural landscape and narrows in on the associations between water
and the phenomenon of heartbreak; between pixels and lenticular agnosia; between a human
mind’s imagination and a software’s dream; between unsolvable other-worldly mystery and the
nostalgia for the past. In drawing these parallels, COPYRIGHT aims to scrape out the inside of all that we share in the non-scape that is our pasts. The universal scotoma of reality is our
Bond. COPYRIGHT begins with the nebula, and ends with the blinding glare of the moment that cannot be shared, the total involvement in being consumed by death, love or art; the sea to which and from which lonely rivers flow: All encompassing, blinding and singular.



The audio sources:

Dvorak’s “Symphony Number 9” was premiered in 1893. William Arms Fisher put words to the
second movement in 1922, in an attempt to lyricize the nostalgia and isolation that apparently
coalesced in Dvorak, inspiring him to write the symphony. Fisher titled his piece “Going Home.” COPYRIGHT sources a choral rendition of the Fisher arrangement, which is represented visually, paired with expert tutorial on the subject of COPYRIGHTing. The instructor is dissolving into the sound, into Home: you can barely see her through the sublimation. She is sheathed in the holy artifice.

“Bridge Over Troubled Water” was released in 1970; a song we all know and love. COPYRIGHT draws sound from an a cappella rendition of the tune, which marries the “silver girl” alluded to in the song with the Silver Bridge, which collapsed in 1967. The reason for the collapse is, by some, considered unknown; the famed Mothman sightings are thought to be related in some as-yet-unknown way. We are all searching for, or celebrating, or mourning, our own Mothman, and our own “silver girl,” in one form or another.

“Lovesong” was released in 1989, by The Cure. COPYRIGHT uses a chorale arrangement of
the tune.

“Unchained Melody” was written in 1955 by Alex North and Hy Zaret. The song has been reinterpreted over 1,500 times. COPYRIGHT focuses on Willie Nelson’s 1977 rendition. The visual elements of Willie’s performance and that of the Righteous Brothers is paired with
imagery of water (lonely rivers, your brain, flow towards the ultimate presence which is named
death or art or music. The initial naked darkness of the moment of interpretation (your love
interest walking away without smiling) presents the path to the sea, to the bare core of
consummation), and vanishing people, contending with errant pixels, by which they are
ultimately consumed.
The vanishing searchers, with fire, express desire towards the sky. With smoke they are asking for the consummation, or assumption: Arecibo from across the bar, where do rivers begin? At a glance, at the spark of an idea, the melody becomes unchained and is put to process.