Celebrating a Rediscovery of the Intentionally Erased takes six number-one pop hits from the past fifty years and reduces them to comprehensive drones (complex tones derived from the aggregate sum of frequencies in each song section). All songs are rebuilt with the drones, accompanied by the original lyrics displayed on screen as text.
Barbara Streisand sings in 1974, "what's too painful to remember we simply choose to forget." While Barbara refers to a fallen relationship as a source of pain, she sings of the freedom to forget as a method for rebuilding herself. But what if Barbara's music itself is painful? What if the song forces upon us a history with which we cannot associate? The success of The Way We Were, dictated by record sales and radio airtime, nearly guarantees that it will never be forgotten. Like all number one hits, the song becomes a permanent and everlasting object, as are the associative memories restored with every listen.
My objective is to listen to such music as unfinished, to experience the recorded object as a transitional moment. To make it easier, I've pulled these songs down from the charts and reduced them to pure sound and lyrical content. The listener faces an absence in the raw materials of the song. The hook has disappeared. Relying on a mix of imperfect memory and imagination, the listener must actively hum the hook back into the flow. Distracted from "feeling" the music, and challenged to remember the song as it was recorded, the listener is functionally disconnected from memories triggered by the original track. The recorded object is no longer a reference for old emotions, and now, like a musical score, depends on present conditions for its interpretation and understanding.
Using excessive production techniques to disinfect the recorded object of human residue, my goal was to push the songs to the point where all we're left with is a ghost, the vague shadow of a person, a message lost in massive sound. By eviscerating the familiar rhythms and memorable melodies of these number one hits, Celebrating a Rediscovery of the Intentionally Erased encourages a critical reading of popular music, which is otherwise too palatable to be questioned.