Duane Gorey: Collision Suite
January 2022

During the month of January 2022, Massachusetts-based musician, visual artist, and gardener Duane Gorey interacted with and documented the acoustic and ambient qualities of lower_cavity and its surroundings. Gorey also recorded vocals for Collision Suite, a group of songs originally composed for previous lower_cavity resident Jak Ritger as part of Ritger’s Collider show in September 2021.

But first, the good news: we are not out of options:

<<<CURRENT SURVEILLANCE STATUS:>>>
<<<BILLBOARD LIBERATIONIST (MEDICALLY INELIGIBLE)>>>
<<<NORTH WESTERN COMMONWEALTH (COLONIZER CLASS)>>>
<<<SURVIVES OFF GOVERNMENT AID (FOOD STAMP FREELOADER)>>>
<<<MASS HEALTH>>>
<<<STILL HAS NOT RECEIVED STIMULUS PAYMENT>>>
<<<STILL HASN’T CAUGHT COVID FINGERS CROSSED>>>
<<<BOOSTED>>>
<<<HAS DONE HIS OWN RESEARCH AND MADE INFORMED CHOICE>>>
<<<OFF MEDS>>>
<<<ALL MY APES GONE TRUTHER>>>

IN THE DARK TIMES 
WILL THERE ALSO BE SINGING 
YES THERE WILL BE SINGING
ABOUT THE DARK TIMES

- Bertolt Brecht

August 22, 2022

Who are you who are we
In times of crisis, these are life and death questions
What happens here is relevant elsewhere

I began assembling this work in July of 2021, leading up to my time at lower_cavity in January of 2022, and continued in the months afterwards; editing, arranging, writing and re-recording.

The most successful thing about any project is finishing it

While working I thought a lot about the anxiety that looms for myself, and I would guess many of us, this atmospheric anxiety that can prevent one from finishing any number of things that are so close to done. In my darker moments, it seems impossible that it could matter, in the face of this humanitarian crisis and global devastation that is finally beginning to be acknowledged in mainstream consciousness. How can my musings “make a difference”? Does it matter if they make a difference? I was constructing a temporary wall sculpture, thinking it’s just going to go away, when thankfully a kinder part of me reminded that it was still possible somebody could enjoy beholding it, at least for a moment, and maybe even appraise some of their own meaning. It was one of those switches that goes off in your head, restoring some confidence and making you feel a little better about doing impermanent things. I’ve spent too much time hung up about doing only permanent things, when there’s never been any guarantee of permanence. Some movements and motions are bound to stick around for a long time, no matter how much it might change out there, but there’s no calculation to determine what will endure. Still though, for now we endure.

Quarantine Sheets 1 and 2: These songs began over the first part of this stupid fucking pandemic as I traveled from my hometown of Leominster, Massachusetts, to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, then the small town of Red Hook in New York’s Hudson River Valley, and after that to Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Nudging the skeletal guitar parts along as song sketches whenever I could, practicing the music for no reason other than to distract myself and maintain a muscle memory. Eventually I landed in Deerfield MA, thirty miles north of Holyoke, in May of 2021. Jak Ritger invited me to participate in his Collider event at the closing of his lower_cavity residency that September, so I finished the songs, adding lyrics and composing backing tracks on my computer’s Garageband program. When I returned to lower_cavity for my residency the following January, I employed the technique of placing a microphone high in a back corner of the room, broadcasting the previously recorded vocal track across the space, then recording the reverberation of my digitalized, disembodied voice as it bounced and rolled through the air, off the walls, ceiling and floor, splitting around the beams and gathering in the corners. This method not only captured the sound I had intentionally created, but also the natural hum of the building, groaning and settling in the wind and cold of the winter, and the sounds of incidental life happening outside. My own singing, distorted and ghostified, mixing with the unidentifiable hisses and pings. The cracks in the brick walls leaked whispers of the bent workers and grinding machinery which had occupied the space so many years before. The sound on this track was mixed to be best experienced at a medium to slightly loud volume.

Trailer, Trashed began as an improvised meditation taken from journal entries made during the time i was working by myself at LC in January, recited over a karaoke version of the Modest Mouse song Trailer Trash. This was recorded in my current home, surrounded by the once lush but currently drought withered state parks and forests of Chester, Blandford and Huntington, a part of the western Massachusetts region where American flags are posted on seemingly every available surface, numerous local residents fly US confederate flags (neo N*zi dog whistle) in their front yards, the majority of political support expressed openly is casually pro-fascist, and we have had to boil our water for the last year in order to theoretically render it safe for consumption. Most of the people I encounter who live around here seem to think everything is good and fine. My shithole country tis of thee.

Trance State of Prophecy: Documentation of Collision Suite drone guitar performance from Collider, September 2021, lower_cavity (spoken text taken from Frank Herbert’s God Emperor Of Dune).

(Learning who I am not
has been
such a powerful means
of addition by subtraction)

The trance state of prophecy is like no other visionary experience. It is not a retreat from the raw exposure of the senses (as are many trance states) but an immersion in a multitude of new movements. Things move. It is an ultimate pragmatism in the midst of Infinity, a demanding consciousness where you come at last into the unbroken awareness that the universe moves of itself, that it changes, that its rules change, that nothing remains permanent or absolute throughout all such movement, that mechanical explorations for anything can work only within precise confinements and, once the walls are broken down, the old explanations shatter and dissolve, blown away by new movements. The things you see in this trance are sobering, often shattering. They demand your utmost effort to remain whole and, even so, you emerge from that state profoundly changed.