“Abgrund” is german for abyss, precipice, chasm.
two side-long pieces recorded in 2012.
cover features stunning artwork by Matteo Castro.
large insert featuring an indepth text by Bill McKibben.
audio powerfully mastered by Riccardo Mazza.
nothing is unavoidable and those who conjure up fatality only do so to evade responsibility. in order to justify the impossibility of change it is claimed that the systems have become too complex.
the problem is not the complexity of modern democracies. the motives for exploitation are not complicated. greed isn’t complicated, waste isn’t complicated, indifference isn’t complicated. murder and expulsion aren’t complicated. on the contrary: they describe the greatest possible simplification of human existence – the reduction to gain and loss. no more complicated is our own entanglement.
one thing that’s complicated is the confusion into which this joint responibility leads us. what’s also complicated is that we recognise how unjustly wealth is distributed but that we’re hardly willing to change anything about it. what’s complicated is that we pass on our own responsibility onto a system. what’s complicated is that we believe that we own freedom.
credits
released 01 January 2013
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PLAY LOUD
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dave phillips re/searches and ponders existences and behaviourisms humanimalistically via sonic de/construction and psycho-acoustics. sound as a means to activate primordial shared emotions otherwise hidden by civilised experience – sound is communication in direct & primal form, a method of understanding. dp’s work shares, triggers existentialist ruminating and exchange, is a catalyst for the action of engaging, insinuates awareness, muses on honesty, responsibility, intervention and laughter and delivers some form of release, a release that is liberating & purifying, a polemical catharsis that opposes the omnipresent reduction of existence, a ritual that desires to cast aside artificial, material and superstitious arrangements and constraints and puts us in touch with our sentient origins as much as with realities of the times we live in.
working solo since 1987, dave phillips has travelled and played across half the globe, and with a conscious point of view has collected and recorded communications, situations and suggestions that have become the body of his work, immersing himself in
humanimalism, psycho-acoustics, metaphysics, sonic rituals, existentialism, voice/body, organics, insects, microcosmic perspectives and shamanic performance.
