Streaming, download and cassette with postcards here:
squareears.bandcamp.com/album/mind-maps


Art auction as cinematic blockbuster.

Coronavirus statistics intoned over a zoom call.

Alan Watts, crows, God, anti-God.

AND YOU SHOULD FEEL GRATEFUL.

mind maps is the debut cassette release from square ears founder David Curington. A manically over-assembled collage of sonic and semiotic association. Internet rabbit-holes as sound. Once comprehensible revision notes derailed, to help no-one pass any exams, ever.

Three tracks are paired with three corresponding images, included as postcards with this release.

monet money mahogany’s starting point is a rumination on the visual art world through a Sotheby’s auction of a Monet painting, recorded through laptop speakers from a YouTube video as if to say Curington would never have had sufficient power or status to have been in the room: a running theme throughout mind maps is that how a sample is recorded is just as important as what the sample represents. Curington’s artistic response to the colour of Monet’s painting is to rerecord a couple Debussy piano preludes through an old tape machine in a bathroom and blend the results together to form a surreal haze which gradually overwhelms the track: the subtle hues of Monet become a coarse, blast-furnace red.
 
maths mattes masks, although intended as a reflection on mathematics (the subject of Curington’s undergraduate degree), quickly gets pulled towards the most concrete collective reference point to 2021: the coronavirus pandemic. The opening sound world is as if over zoom audio, listening to a robotic voice coldly delivering daily infection rates while sine tones hover indifferently, but this soon opens up into a surreal lecture with added sound effects. However, as the lecturer’s voice (Curington’s) gets ever more distorted, it is revealed that he was in fact no more human than the robot reading statistics. The track ends with the dry sound of a calculator being aimlessly tapped and scraped: numbers and logic stripped of all meaning.

mimic mattock mythic is part motivational soundtrack, part church service, part lecture, part chasing after a murder of crows after sunset in Highfield Country Park. The voice of Alan Watts persists throughout, deconstructing religious and scientific meaning, while a church organist triumphantly warms his message, perhaps having denounced religion but keen to enjoy the sounds and tropes of the service anyway. Eckhart Tolle plays the deep voice of “God” and a prayer bowl periodically fights its way through the contorted semantics and increasing digital distortion.

AND YOU SHOULD FEEL GRATEFUL.