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World​-​Class Technology - Broken Crystals

from 1983​-​2002 by Larry Wendt

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Broken Crystals
This narrative text-sound piece is something of a variation upon the theme of the last piece and is narrated by this typical Silicon Valley worker who works for an integrated circuit foundry that grows garnet crystals for the manufacturing of bubble memory. Bubble memory was a form of non-volatile memory that became commercially viable in the 1970s as a possible replacement for magnetic hard disk drives, which were mechanical (with moving parts that would break down), sensitive to excessive vibration, expensive, and took up a lot of space. Bubble memory was "slower" than static semiconductor memory (which lost its contents when the power was turned off), but was useful in niche applications where portability as well as excessive vibration were an issue. However, as hard drives became smaller, less expensive, and sturdier as well as the development of much faster and denser, non-volatile "Flash" drives, bubble memory became as extinct as the fruit orchards of San Jose.
However, I have a contrary story in confusion to all of that. This is one of my earliest extended narration pieces to take the form of a personal recollection. It is more of a text-sound composition rather than purely a sound poem in my understanding of the terms. Much of my previous work with spoken texts, involved their syntax being fragmented or manually processed (various "cut-up" techniques) with random juxtapositions providing springboards from which more texts would be created in an attempt to fill the contextual gaps. I soon came to realize that in an actual narrative structure, one could say almost any non-contextual, illogical, or absurd thing, and as long as the speaking rhythms remained true, it would be perceived as having some kind of validity. In a personal recollection, one flits back and forth between private and public memories, which can liquify the understanding of the text, and often the truth in such a narration lies only in the sincerity of the delivery. Rather than just have a single narrative voice "recite" a text, I also conceived of providing a "noise floor" as if the spoken text had to be "excavated" to be perceived as if it were a story being told in a noisy room. This became the model of many of my performance pieces in which I would do a "live reading" of the narrative using a background tape of manipulated sounds more or less relevant to the texture of the piece, as well as process my speaking voice simultaneously with a more or less portable, home-brew, microprocessor-controlled, vocal processing device. This allowed me immediacy in a live, real-time performance which would be lacking if I just played studio-constructed tape pieces through a set of speakers.

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from 1983​-​2002, released May 2, 2023

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WHY KEITH DROPPED THE S image

WHY KEITH DROPPED THE S

In the liner notes of many 60s and 70s Rolling Stones releases, Keith Richards is named Keith Richard. Why did he drop the s?

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