ENEMY OF THE STATE (O Lamb of the Lord), Simone de HAAN solo trombone

THIS IS THE third of a growing set of short occasional pieces. I like to think of these as part musical diary, and part musical activism. The pieces are rather like MIRRORS MADE OF SOUND -- some would say shards of glass & barbed-wire -- mirrors that reflect in an open, honest, naked way the violent insanity of the present cultural, political moment. The basic theme is simple: Humanity seems caught in a contradiction between the Demonic and the Divine, caught between, on the one hand, the self-destructive violence of war and conflict, and, on the other hand, the great promise of the natural intelligence of Nature, the Sacred, and the living Earth. Becoming aware of this contradiction and how it manifests as a formative force in our culture, our politics, our thought and consciousness -- and, indeed, our art and music -- is, I think, a central challenge of our time. The texts used are generally selected at random. Computer synthetic speech is preferred here as a way of mirroring how mechanical our actual human speech -- to my ear so loud, fast, aggressive, utterly without rhythm and breath -- has become. Individual words, phrases, fragments of public discourse, documents, outright lies, propaganda, etc. are distributed using chance operations which then go on to form complex, polyglot temporal vortices. At the same time, two historical source texts -- embodying this contradiction between the Divine & Demonic -- are juxtaposed with each other throughout the whole. (These are translations from the German, and are from J.S. BACH & Joseph GOEBELS.) Other pieces in the new series are: (2) DEVIL'S TRIANGLE https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/devils-triangle-wav (1) SUNSHINE & KITTENS https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/sunshine-kittens-a-musical-reflection-of-cultural-insanity-simone-de-haan-trombone IMAGE: (Muted) Snake River, BROWNLEE DAM, present-day Idaho/Oregon border, USA. The prison-like grid of 39 mega dams on the great COLUMBIA WATERSHED is, in my view, a textbook example of the above-mentioned contradiction between the Demonic impulse to control by violent force, & the Divine intelligence manifest in natural, flowing, living water.