This is the middle piece in my Cul­ture series, which is an explo­ration of the effects that today’s cul­tural con­text has on making our music what it is. The text for the piece is taken from a junk e-mail mes­sage—cer­tainly among the more recent of lit­er­ary genres. It attracted me because it is com­posed entirely of mono­syl­labic words, with no rep­e­ti­tion; a kind of het­ero­ge­neous stream that strikes me as contemporary.

The middle sec­tion of the piece is inde­ter­mi­nate or open: the per­form­ers decide how the musi­cal mate­ri­als will be pre­sented. This is also some­thing that I take from the Cul­ture theme, because the mul­ti­plic­ity of pos­si­bil­i­ties, end­less var­ie­ga­tion, and the impos­si­bil­ity of find­ing “right” answers seem to me impor­tant cul­tural prob­lems today.

The texts for the five pieces in this set are taken from spam email mes­sages that I col­lected in 2006. I am attracted to the idea of using spam email texts because of what they rep­re­sent. Since the pur­pose of com­mer­cial spam is always to trick some­one into spend­ing money, these texts are always tar­geted at our most deep-seated fears and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. This makes them a pow­er­ful source of sub­ject matter.

Each of the five texts tries to exploit spe­cific vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, described below:

1. Sen­sa­tional Rev­o­lu­tion in Med­i­cine — Phys­i­cal infir­mity, fail­ure of con­ven­tional treat­ments, lack of hope.
2. The Most Impor­tant Work of Your Career — Job dis­sat­is­fac­tion, appeals to authority.
3. One Hun­dred Seventy-Three Cen­time­tres, Fifty-Three Kilo­grams — Lone­li­ness, lack of social inter­ac­tion, lack of roman­tic opportunity.
4. Dear User. Why Don’t You… — Lack of self-confidence, prob­lems with body image, lust.
5. A Time of Resource — Greed, feel­ings of miss­ing out, peer pressure.

This piece is based on the sound of the word shit in twelve dif­fer­ent lan­guages. It trav­els from west to east geo­graph­i­cally across the world. The lan­guages were chosen either because I speak them, or because I could find a native speaker of that lan­guage to teach me how to say shit. I did, how­ever, attempt to keep a some­what even spac­ing between geo­graph­i­cal areas, although a com­pletely even dis­tri­b­u­tion would have been, of course, impos­si­ble to realize.

Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments is based on a sequence of very brief text frag­ments extracted from a much longer poetic work, enti­tled I Lost Every­thing by poet Sarah Lang. The piece always presents this series of word-units in order and with­out over­lap. Each unit is spoken—not sung—at the begin­ning of a musi­cal ges­ture, and always by the per­former who is play­ing the ges­ture. Each unit is also repeated mul­ti­ple times.

I have decided on this approach in order to dis­tance the text from any fixed nar­ra­tive. The music instead pro­vides a space for these lan­guage objects to be observed in, and in which the lis­tener can choose to create or not create his or her own nar­ra­tive. Pre­sented in this mono­lithic manner and detached from the con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of lan­guage prepo­si­tions, Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments sets up the oppor­tu­nity for a kind of mytho­log­i­cal reac­tion to develop around the pre­con­cep­tions of the lis­tener. The word-units com­bine with the music to create hints, but hope­fully hints that will take each lis­tener in a dif­fer­ent direction.