Part I: Curington’s Eustress Screen Time Compositions
Various studies researching the effects of excessive screen time and media multitasking have suggested that it can overload the sensory system, fracture attention span, deplete mental reserves, increase anxiety and reduce curiosity – particularly for a child’s development. It is also said to have a negative effect to executive functioning, sensorimotor development and academic outcomes.
Other studies share an opposing view and have stated there is no evidence to show that screen time impacts brain function or well-being, and in some controlled circumstances can improve socialisation, encourage literacy, promote creativity and enhance education. However, no matter where you fall in the debate, there is no argument that screen time is here to stay after becoming integrated into being a core component of our daily lives.
[eustress | moderate or normal psychological stress, interpreted as being beneficial]
David Curington is a sound and visual artist with a PhD in composition and is founder of the Square Earslabel. He follows up ‘A Typical Sunday’ – a spoken word found object collaboration with Yol released on Steep Gloss – and ‘Textiles’ – experiments in converting and distorting the written word into audio on Human Geography Recordings – with their own elusive study into ‘Screen Time’.
Released on Eustress Tapes, a sub-imprint of Human Geography Recordings, Curington’s Screen Time contains eight sonic experiences of varying lengths across its thirty-minute runtime. Listening to this project is likely to incite a vast range of emotional and physical reactions and the MEANS Research Team encourages you to dose as required, proceed with thrilling caution and poetic abandonment, then repeat until fulfilled.
Screen Time is a constantly shifting exhibition of textured internet sculptures which cut across noise music, glitched jazz wastelands, gentrified electronics and the physicality of YouTube’s search algorithm. We are presented with a shapeshifting nowhere space where visceral scraps and emotional edges grow out from an ever-expanding and warped setting.
Curington’s playful cyber-waste collages excavate the uncanniness of current era capitalism and covers it in a black comedic, fluid facade. There is a hyper-present detachment, an urban alienation which distorts cultural facsimiles and plays with logical and lexical semantics.
Explosions of beautifully uncertain assemblages capture pain, humour, confusion, fragility, a certain madness. A digital isolation crashes into manifestations of absurdist moments from everyday life. Always shifting, breaking and reshaping form and format, recent histories are recycled and conflicting tensions and chaos are embraced by a hasty parade of disjointed sounds choreographed with intensity and legerdemain.
Part II: Screen Time Breakdown
1. We_ve Been Very Clear That [02:28]
The opening track presents elevated, rapidly cycling left/right stereo symptoms which follow in the tradition of John Cage’s 1965 gigapixel-spliced tape works ‘Rozart Mix’ (as well as Aaron Dilloway’s recent realisation of Cage’s process), Milan Knizak’s ‘Broken Music’ and the mash-up sampling of Carl Stone. A scrambling auditory chaos rushes out of the speakers, interchanging every split-second, switching between swift sensory microstates in search of the next content hit. It is a glorious junk collage symphony formed from escaping syllables and splintered sounds detached from original contexts, including sped up text-to-speak phases (spearcons), snippets of musical melodic patterns (earcons) and representations of real sounds (auditory icons).
Reverberations of mass consumption fills the soundwaves in a post-metaverse, where John Wall’s fragmented glitchscapes intersect with alien signals, frequency drifts and whiplashed cut ups from Sissy Spacek’s ‘Radio Format’ era. It’s an experience which plunders, samples, clips and reacts to a continuous scrolling content ballet; a hypnotic cerebral dance where not one step is ever the same.
The source message in We_ve Been Very Clear That is lost. All meaning is drained. Medium is everything. It’s doomscrolling dopamine hit after hit and hit, while serotonin levels drop, Spotify stutters and Google Translate fails. Everything is flotsam, recycled noise floating across overlapping online spaces and autofill on steroids. Despite this overall lack of clarity, listening to this track does have the ability to cleanse and stimulate – just go with the flow.
2. Broad Church [5:14]
And now for a sudden come down and change of pace. We enter an immediately more physical space, welcomed into a trippy Lynchian service of worship where choral and Gregorian and gospel melodies coexist; a Sunday Service Aretha-choir duetting with the processed choral loops of Graham Lambkin’s ‘Dumb Answer to Miracles’.
This space is immediately more meditative; there are greater levels of oxygen in the room. We can breathe a little more easily within this shifting sea of wordless chants and haunted harmonies. Detached from clear meaning and lines of communication, the time-stretched and pitch-shifted human voices still takes the listener away from the centre of familiar language, creating a sense of the almost alien and yet strangely familiar.
3. Vital Statistics [02.33]
We are dropped right back into a spinning headspace, a claustrophobic network of constant word salads, online advertising and media detritus, hierarchical classification of data streams and crumbling James Ferraro vaporwave, chopped and shuffled into a spellbinding mystery soup.
Vital Statistics shares some of Asha Sheshadri’s craft for deconstructing spoken word and textual semantics through a montage of exchanged sense-making platforms. Yet, unlike the first track, there are now greater suggestions of rhythm (albeit ultra brief) which hint at a hip-hop sample-centric sensibility.
An evolution is starting to occur, with understandable language beginning to blossom. From out of previously isolated syllables and letters, now come forth actual words. But these words and stringed together partial fragments magic responses which are unique to the interpretations of the listener.
Looking for meaning is still not the key, because everything is jammed, in flux. Texts becomes slogans, buzzwords, metaphors. To unlock the code is to appreciate the shards of language as audible building blocks in the infinite scrolling collage. Everything exists in the abstract. Individuality is lost within general statistics. Music is an electronic transfer. We’re all 0’s and 1’s. Cash-less avatars pinging from server to server up in the cloud.
4. Do Your Liverwurst [04:01]
“I have a terrible fear of making a record of a Beethoven Sonata and somewhere, some day, someone is going to listen to it while eating a liverwurst sandwich.” – Artur Schnabel (classical pianist, composer and pedagogue)
Schnabel’s liverwurst quip hinted at his fear of how recorded music would be consumed by the listener. Not played live at a setting or volume originally intended to be listened to, but instead functioning as background music to stale dinner parties or rambunctious family meals.
In our ever-increasing digital and remote spaces, what then of Benjamin Britten’s ‘holy triangle’ of composer, performer and listener? A relationship Britten said was required to create the magic of the musical experience. Multi-tasking is our normalised, daily practice; it is very common to be doing something else as well as listening (because music ‘only’ requires your ears after all!). If there are fewer attentive listeners, can there still be magic in the music experience between performer and the public when albums < singles < 10-second TikTok earworms?
A case study of these concerns, Do Your Liverwurst presents the listener with what sounds like YouTubers telling us how to make a sandwich paired to classical music (or muzak). As well as Schnabel, it reminds me of the time I read about the sandwiches Arnold Schoenberg had at his 60th birthday which included liverwurst among them. Perhaps there is also an inside joke somewhere about how in some works of classical music there is not enough meat in the sandwich – one memorable aria spread too thinly across a longer, more unforgettable work.
Do Your Liverwurst’s contradiction of high and low arts functions as a palette cleanser, and appetiser, after the frazzled state of the previous track. All the talk of sandwich preparations becomes rather poetic, especially considering these commentaries and instructions are the most easily digestible words for the listener to be able to understand so far. It’s almost heartfelt listening to human voices speak about a subject so apparently trivial with such passion after the preceding content overload.
5. Why I_m Still Single [02:52]
Just another day trying to find love online, with thanks to the algorithm and AI bots. Why I_m Still Single sounds like unsynced conversations between lonely digital assistants and humankind across parallel protective chat bubbles full of cold connections and digital detachment.
Backed by whirring theremin sounds of UFOs rising and falling (which also recall a synthesised groan tube toy), robotic voices utter pseudo-romantic expressions and ironic cultural lol jokes (“Did Ross and Rachel ever split up?”) while sharing screen time with a human expression of musical note frequency thinking.
6. Making Progress [05:17]
Multiple voices interact and intersect over rattling chains or chugging motors which recall Lambkin’s ‘Swan Song’. Making Progress is a deconstruction of form, a composition akin to Arnulf Rainer’s overpaintings – asking us to question what the right direction is to take, what is the right draft to read, where is the original source? And how would we know? Which voice do we listen to in a world where everyone has a stage?
With echoes of Duncan Harrison’s linguistic cut ups and abstracted domestic tape mulch, this track makes progress through repetition. And repetition here is not simply repeating because this technique creates new movement via diverted energy across the horizontal composition. It feels like the listener is on a bumpy journey, riding along a road full of neural potholes, while strangers whisper confusables into their ear.
7. What Goes Around [02:55]
We are inside a cartoon. Streaming an old Looney Tunes episode. But our internet connection is not the best, so the cartoon cuts out at regular intervals leaving us with moments of haunted silence while the content is buffering.
What goes around comes around. The silences in this track create an increasingly greater sense of anticipation and also moments of relief. A pause. A rare chance to contemplate what might come next?
8. Music = 42 [04:29]
10 ENMET N:S=0 [slowly distorting waves of deep thought dial tones]
20 POR J=1 schema AL N <It takes light 10 to the minus 42nd power seconds to cross the diameter of a proton>
101010 [[a sine tone minotaur in the media labyrinth]]
30 whispers and whistles and whines on the wind SE J=ENT(J/2)*2
TIAM S=S-J:IRAL 50
42 es la respuesta a la pregunta final
40 S=S+J sonification
50 REE J ambient_noise_wall_streaming_bitcrusher
60 PRES J 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 1*
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, X, E and T or 0-9, A, B and C
Now That’s What I Call Music = 42 !
…ready, static, go…
Part III: Screen Time Summary
By playing with patterns of expectation and surprise in the perception of non-music, Screen Time functions as a digital thesis which deconstructs personal concerns about the human condition. It is a soundtrack to a Baudrillard reality, one increasingly based on references to references, where the ‘real’ becomes distorted by layers of abstraction in the hyperreal. The project ingeniously merges disembodied artifacts into rearranged signifiers and creates new cultural contexts for our attention-deficit times.
Curington switches between intense sonic portraits fuelled by the speed surfing shuffle of sugar-rushed, clashing frequencies, and saturated media landscapes which appear at first less intense but still pack a sensory punch. When scraps of context can be gleamed and moments of clarity snap into place, it isn’t long before these are again dissected in the next thought – as sources expand and collapse into abstract expressionism.
Emotional induction in the listener arises from the deviation from, or denial of, expectations throughout Screen Time. Often the depth of information consumed can be disorientating, which is perhaps exactly the point. However, the sense of pacing across each densely layered track guides the listener through a range of uncanny emotional responses.
Screen Time is a perfect fit for Eustress Tapes’ M.O. – a challenging yet rewarding listen which could even lead willing listeners towards a positive psychological flow state – the ultimate eustress experience.
The MEANS research study of Screen Time concludes with the recommendation for the listener to close their eyes and play David Curington’s project loud, to allow the mind to wander and to embrace any forming kaleidoscopic pictures while you are transported across decoded timelines and down hyperlinked rabbit holes.
Screen Time is available now to experience from Eustress Tapes’ Bandcamp.
Ryan Hooper
MEANS Research Team
ADDENDUM:
[default notification chat bot chime tone “BUY THIS THING”//_set_calendar_alert_210824] Future David_Curington textured-noise-broadcasts includes: ‘Composer REACTS / After These Messages’// sensory overload coming to Difficult_Art_and_Music in August…]
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