Art Metropole

#14861

The Magic of the Think Machine Gods (LP)

Artist

Andrew Zealley

Price

$30.00

Date

2021

Publisher

Disco Hospital Books & Records

Format

Audio

ISBN

PNPLP-02

Size

12 × 12 inches

Genre

Vinyl

The Magic of the Think Machine Gods is the second vinyl release by House of Intergenerational.

Released hot-on-the-heels of House of Intergenerational’s debut 2LP, Soft Subversions, this new LP features two long-form works, one per side: “The Magic of the Think Machine Gods” (duration: fifteen minutes and thirty-six seconds) b/w “The Intolerable Weight of Seventh Heaven” (duration: fourteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds). The title track features the voice of Angl0-American queer writer, Christopher Isherwood, reading from his novel, A Single Man (1964). “The Intolerable Weight of Seventh Heaven” features the voice of African- American writer and activist, James Baldwin, reading from his novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956). All spoken word sonic source material is drawn from public domain recordings made in 1976 and 1967 respectively.

House of Intergenerational is the DJ platform for Toronto-based cultural practitioner and queer political theorist, Andrew Zealley. For The Magic of the Think Machine Gods, Zealley set-out to situate the spoken word narratives in sonic ways that comply first and foremost with the storytelling, that is, the music/sound follows closely with and responds directly to each unfolding turn in the narrative. Both tracks explore intersectional issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, power, relationality, and—in the case of the title composition—the pragmatic limits of institutionalized post-secondary education. Through the entanglement of spoken word passages (and the meanings, possibilities, and power struggles inherent in the temporal location of each), the audio performs as a kind of queer time machine: voices from queer pasts interact with music and sounds that reflect queer socio-sonic spaces of the present through tropes of house, electro, dub, and repetition (as desire-creation).

Produced by PSBEUYS.
Mastered by Brandon Hocura.
Cover and label drawings by Bill Thelen.
Pressed on white vinyl in a numbered edition of 150, The Magic of the Think Machine Gods plays at 45 rpm.