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by xenaudial

It would be preemptive to mention D. B. Scroll at this point, but suffice it to say Xenaudial had stumbled onto a preexisting stratagem quite blithely unawares, his happenstance experiment nothing more than the furtive product of stoned divagation. (To be sure, he had been concurrently making large-scale drawings of möbius strips in order to model an understanding of how the increasingly febrile presentism of late late capitalism ends up occulting long-term slippages, erosions and accumulations but hadn’t really thought through their implications and co-implications yet, including—especially—the potential to resume a practice from some point in the near-to-distant past, on picking up a relayed electrical transmission…or momentarily accessing a wormhole, two time periods suddenly superimposed).

Xenaudial had been trained to believe that an artwork’s resilience and effectiveness were in direct proportion to the complexity (and attendant long duration) of its fabrication—his mixes famously dense both horizontally and vertically, collapsing together field recordings, labyrinthine musical systems, and meta-conceptual tactics—so it took him some time to accept the idea that complexity might emerge from a brutally (stupidly) simple maneuver. He returned to constructing his paeans to overstimulation.

Yet the Love-Green conjunction continued to beckon. He hadn’t even bothered lining the songs up in an editing program. He simply started one quicktime file and then the other immediately afterwards—micro-pausing the first to compensate for the lag in start time—then the two files would run unimpeded. It was beautiful. Nothing else to do but listen. The coïncidences began intensifying. Xenaudial reckoned that most pop songs followed a standard intro-verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus-(outro) format and were of roughly equivalent duration (somewhere between 2-and-a-half to 4 minutes) so you could expect things would line up, sort of. That a lamenting dirge and a midtempo soul number could enter into contact with one another through this formal collusion was one of the magnificent potentials of this contingency that presented itself to him that balmy Summer evening in the West Loop. But it was much more than that.