This is a drone in the key of A, for Adam Curtis, the genius storyteller, journalist filmmaker. There are few truth bearers embraced by the mainstream. There are few that step right onto the conspiracy, exposing it, while saying nothing about it. The facts around it are given and you are left to piece together your shattered reality. He is ruthless and becoming more relevant by the decade, as the fake world that he turned over in his documentaries has become more transparent than ever.
This ambient drone music was improvised on guidelines, in the key of A (for Adam), entirely generated from the ARP Odyssey. The guideline was that wanted to spell out his name. The first tone is A, the second is D, the next is A but the octave up, then I continue spelling out the keyboard, so that the letter m lands on F, in the octave up. Finally, I broaden the harmony with a C at the top and bottom octave. The resulting harmony is A minor. It could be performed in a thousand different ways following this direction.
Usually I just improvise and then get annoyed that I have to come up with a name. It was nice having a concept in mind for this. And I wanted an excuse to share my appreciation for Adam Curtis.
His documentaries almost always leave me scratching my head, reevaluating history. The Century of Self and Hypernormalization should be watched by everyone. I don’t believe you can live in this world and interpret media and politicians accurately without seeing these films, or at least taking in the information contained in them.
I am a conspiracy theorist. But Curtis is not. He is exposing the crest of the wave but doesn’t speculate at all. He will make bold claims, like al-Qaida wasn’t real before 9-11. He lays it out in The Power of Nightmares and backs it up. It is fact. As much as I knew about 9-11, I always believed at least that al-Qaida was real. But then Curtis avoids every trapping of suggesting that the attacks on that day were somehow not real, or as folks say, an inside job. His ability to discriminate fake from reality is what I love about him. So I continue to seek out every film he has ever made.
It is notoriously difficult to get good copies of his films because they air on BBC and you need access to that network. You can only bypass that with a VPN or piracy. I am including a YouTube account that has several decent free copies to stream, but the quality is definitely all over the place.
