fatal four-way, or a four-plait braided conference call

fatal 4-way, or a four-plait braided conference call

This project began as an experiment in fiction, in building voices beyond my own using professional wrestling as an architecture, and has become a small production in sound. In this poem for 4 voices, now something akin to a score or a script, lines were built in an associative and reactive manner, where each voice speaks (or does not speak) on cue, informing, reacting, or moving the piece forward into the next line. The current iteration of this piece is intended to be a sound installation with four speakers, each representing a separate voice in its own respective channel.

Each of 3 voices are made entirely from collaged texts found in a selection of literary and art historical sources that built my perception of “art” as a younger version of myself, however this piece wrenches words from their original contexts, twists their meanings by creating new contexts, and forces them to perform. In one sense, the sources are treated like toys or textural elements in a word association game, and in another sense, as they have become so far removed from their origins, the sources have become immaterial. Conceptually, I think this treatment parallels some of the recklessness in which wrestling appropriates its own language, especially since I argue that professional wrestling is a perfect distillation of capitalism— instead of pointing out the gaps in language, I have ultimately created a larger gap, breaking both sense and syntax. The fourth voice is my own, reacting to, playing along, and criticizing the others, further aligning the piece with professional wrestling’s core habitual blurring of reality to build fiction.

It was necessary to use a spreadsheet to write this piece. In its written form, each column is a separate voice and each line in the spreadsheet is read separately, isolated like a beat, without the continuity of how one would speak meter normally. With multiple voices speaking at once, the idea is that this rhythm hints at both choreography and chaos, becoming abstracted in the process.