Abuses of political power have been on my mind lately, and this was a very intense project to work on. Basel Khartabil, a software engineer who worked on open-source projects, was arrested and charged with “harming state security.” He was imprisoned for many years, but now it has been months since anyone has heard from him.
Making this piece was very difficult - I was using the words of someone who found hope in a hopeless situation, and may no longer be alive. I hope I did him justice.
I started by building a drone of stacked fifths, taking a high note on my accordion and then pitching it down in Ableton’s Sample… I used these stacked fifths in “The Analyst, Movement III” to portray divinity and purity, and in this context I use it to portray freedom and self-determination. As we hear snippets of Basel’s letter describing his imprisonment, one note of the drone moves down by a half-step, introducing dissonance. The piece ends when the fundamental note moves up by a half-step.
Underneath everything is Basel’s letter, read in its entirety, twice. It starts out unprocessed, then slowly a vocoder takes it over until it becomes percussive static.
The final element is distant “crashes.” I wanted there to be irregular washes of white static to indicate breathing and the solitude of a prison cell, but Ableton gave me a weird drill-like glitch, which I pitched down and run through some delays to make it a wash of white noise. It sounds like distant gunfire or walls crashing.
