Listening Center: Time Out of Joint Mixtape

Listening Center channels Philip K Dick, back roads and bus shelters with the Time Out of Joint (or, Best Bargains in Multiverse Incisions) mixtape

It is said that the Listening Center moves through time as well as space. One may stumble upon it, but only when the Center wants to be found. Our previous encounters with this modernist concrete myth can be studied here and here.

We intercepted this latest transmission under conditions that might be viewed as chance, or else something more sinister.

Liner notes by David Mason, human representative of the Listening Center:

The inspiration for this mix came from both the novel Time Out of Joint by Philip K Dick, and the notion of time being out of joint in a wider sense which might invite sonic commentary. In the 1959 novel, time and space appear to have lost their mutual interdependence; objects and people appear normally, but with transposed identities and existing at odd times. There is an insubstantiality and hollowness to the peculiar American town inhabited by Ragle Gumm, and initially we only vaguely sense the presence of an external controlling agency. Even the prose has a TV dinner quality, holding our perception at arm’s length. What can we learn about our own now from the uncanny, cold war era ersatz world of Time Out of Joint? Is there a way to again delineate the blurred edges of the real and the virtual? The narrative of this collection is a muddled getting lost among dimly heard back roads here and finding the comforting fluorescent hum of a bus shelter there. Against the odds we seek an idyll in time and sound – will we reach our destination?

Tracklist:

A warning to the curious: the Time Out of Joint (or, Best Bargains in Multiverse Incisions) tracklist follows, but it may be advisable to leave and return after you’ve listened to the mixtape. Look away now!

Suite for Harpsichord No1 in A Major HWV 426 Prelude – Georg Friedrich Händel & Glenn Gould

Rite of the Maypol An Unruly Procession – Children of Alice

Faust Suite Prolog i Himlen – Else Marie Pade

Divertimento Performance Tape Section 2 – Tristram Cary

Physicalist – Forma

The Case – Martial Canterel

Growth Sequence – Steve Roach

Clockworks – Laurie Spiegel

Severn Beach – Ekoplekz

Winter Astral – Beverly Glenn Copeland

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