Dret Skivor – 1st September 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
This twenty-two-minute continuous composition is ‘A consideration and contemplation of the stupidity of people who have more money they could ever spend and fritter it away on dick-waving projects instead of paying the tax they should be paying and contributing to society’, adding ‘Billionaires shouldn’t exist at all and we need to start having this conversation.’
Yes. Yes. And yes. It’s been something I’ve been silently raging and experiencing existential agony over in recent months. During the summer, half the planet was on fire. Meanwhile, tax-avoiding billionaires were jetting off into space and planning cage fights to settle the argument of who’s the bigger testosterone-fuelled egotistic manchild.
August saw Oregon flooded following hurricane Hillary and a billion-dollar plus restoration project in its wake: the same week, Virgin Galactic was jetting people into space for fun at a cost of around half a million dollars a ticket. If the ticket fees had been put towards the recovery operation, they’d be well on the way. But these cunts just don’t care. Fuck the plebs in their flooded homes: they’ve all got multiple penthouses well above sea level and they’ve earned their jollies – through the labour of the people who have so little, and some who have even lost everything.
I suffer corpuscle-busting rage at people who jet off on skiing holidays bemoaning the lack of snow. They’re one of the primary reasons there is no snow. How fucking hard is it to grasp? And if cars and planes are heavy polluters, launching rockets is off the scale. Not that they give a fuck. They’ll be dead before the earth becomes inhospitable to human life, and their hellspawn will have all the money and can go and live on Mars, so everything’s fine in their megarich world.
It begins with a grand organ note, as if heralding the arrival of a bride or clergy…and so it continues. On… and on. Five minutes in, and very little has changed. Perhaps some light pedal tweaks , a shift in the air as the trilling drone continues, but nothing discernible. The note hangs and hovers. It fills the air, with the graceful, grand tone that is unique to the organ, a truly magnificent instrument – and I write that with no innuendo intended, no reference to the Marquid de Sade submerged for my personal amusement here.
Admittedly, I had initially anticipated something which would more directly articulate my frothing fury at the fucked-up state of the world, but begin to breathe and relax into this rather mellow soundtrack… I start to think that this abstract backdrop is the salve I need to bring my blood pressure down, and think that perhaps this is the unexpected purpose of this release… but by the ten-minute mark, I find myself bathed in a cathedral of noise, and before long, it’s built to a cacophonous reverb-heavy blast which sounds like an entire city collapsing in slow-motion. And this builds, and builds. Fuck. I’m tense again. I feel the pressure building in my chest, the tension in my shoulders and back aches. It makes sense. This is the real point of this recording. Everything is fine until you log onto social media or read the news, and you see the state of things. Momentarily, you can forget just how fucking terrible everything is, how the world is ruined and how there is no escape from the dismalness of everything, and how capitalism has driven so much of this, creating a life stealing hell for those who aren’t in the minuscule minority.
Fact: 1.1% of the population hold almost 50% of the global wealth. A further 39% of wealth is held by just 11% of the population. 55% of the world’s population hold just 1.3% of the wealth between them. So remind me, how is capitalism working for the world? Trickle-down economics is simply a lie as the wealthy retain their wealth and simply grow it. Liz Truss may think that the UK importing cheese is ‘a disgrace’, but this statistic is mind-blowing.
Eighteen minutes in and my mind is blown, too. It feels like it could be part of the soundtrack to Threads. It’s a dense, obliterative sound, a blowtorch on a global scale, the sound not of mere destination, but ultimate annihilation. It seems fitting, given the future we likely face.
AA
Aural Aggravation 