The Taxidermist (Thirty Pounds of Bone)

This album forms the both the thinking through and the result of on-going research into the fluxed ontology of recording songs. It asks questions about the medium of production as it relates to the performance of music, and the methods by which these are both controlled in the environment of technology, and how these decisions become composition in themselves. The nature of the ‘band’ is unravelled, and the question of ‘definitive’ versions of songs rebuilt in the constructed arena of ‘ideal, and not real events’. The primary theoretical context for this research evolves from the use of Rachel Poliquin’s writing on taxidermy as an analogue for the recording and production process. Considering performance as the ‘animal’, the produced recording develops the same tension of the taxidermied ‘animal/object’. As such the ‘setting’ of the animal becomes distinctly arranged and reified. It becomes a thing. As such, the musical arrangements are deliberately impossible to recreate with a musical ensemble, nor can they be rendered live with technology. Playback of the album is the only means to listen to the complete compositions. The recording process itself insists upon an ontological catastrophe where performance events are only ever facsimile, and fidelity itself provides layers and modes of signification and subsequently meaning.

• https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/3438/