This prompt had a very particular resonance - here in Ireland follies are fairly common, for the reason that they tended to be built as part of famine “relief” efforts by the British colonial administration and landlords. In order to avoid the moral hazard of “handouts”, starving people were instead put to work on pointless buildings and roads to nowhere if they were to feed their families - a mindset that hasn’t gone away to this day. Meanwhile, the colonial administration continued exporting vast amounts of food to England.
There’s far too much to get into here, it’s enough to say that I see these things from time to time and they make me deeply uneasy, while they are often pretty and twee, just under the surface there’s the endemic corruption of a brutal colonial society that relentlessly enforced inequality on its subjects. There are quite a lot of them all over the country, which reflects the scale of the mismanagement - or perhaps malice - and economic injustice that characterised colonial rule.
The piece is based on traditional Irish wooden flute played through a clocked beads patch and mangled in the Digitakt before destroying the audio in various ways in Bitwig. Think it reflects something of the unease that the prompt immediately brought to my mind.
I must set up a Soundcloud for this, my current one is full with files from another project and I haven’t gotten around to creating a new one - not too worried about getting on to the playlist either way, primarily doing these to get into the habit of finishing things.
>here<
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