A little over a month ago I wrote an article about “singles” recordings released by The Living Earth Show (TLES) available through their Bandcamp Web pages. A few days ago I realized that, in addition to the three recordings I had discussed, there was one that had slipped through the cracks when I wrote the piece. So I now wish to make up for that lapse in my reporting.
courtesy of The Living Earth Show
At the very end of last year, TLES released a single with a distinctively odd title, “Stamp him in a Stone Mortar till his Bones are Broken.” The phrase is extracted from one of the recipes that Eliza Smith wrote for her The Compleat Housewife cookbook, which was first published in London in 1727. The recipe (shown in its original version above) is for cock ale, and the referent for those pronouns in the composition’s title is the cock itself!
This recipe was discovered by composer Quinn Collins; and it so intrigued him that it inspired a piece he wrote in 2015 for both TLES and So Percussion, which lasts a little over nine minutes. Collins structured the piece along the lines of Brutalist architecture. In other words he began by planning an overall structure, which would be rigidly maintained as he developed his content. That structure involves abrupt (brutal?) shifts between Andy Meyerson’s barely audible strokes on the vibraphone, some of which are highlighted by Travis Andrews’ single guitar strings, and electric guitar riffs in the genre of heavy metal music.
In our present-day framework, the music seems to have less to do with what happens to the cock in Smith’s recipe and more with the spirit of the Warner Bros. roadrunner cartoons. However, it is not Road Runner that has to endure all that brutality but Wile E. Coyote, instead! One might call Collins’ composition a comedy of exaggerated misfortune, and the TLES recording captures just the right spirit of that comedy.
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