In This World Nothing Is Certain was composed around sampled audio--a mix of various Catholic prayers including the Lord's Prayer, a Hail Mary, and the Guardian Angel Prayer--found on an answering machine tape.  As I worked with the devoted words from the recording, I began to explore the role of religion in my own family.  I was raised in an agnostic household and never experienced Sunday mornings at church or after-school confirmation classes. My grandfather was a successful investment banker and my father has a degree in economics and is in the insurance business. The traditions of organized religion were faint and muted in my childhood. But the importance of fiscal responsibility and balancing a checkbook were learned by observing my father's Sunday morning ritual (his body hunched over in prayer to a calculator with giant gray buttons) of organizing our family's finances.  I began to experiment with editing or muting most of the audible prayer in my samples.  What is left are gasps, slurps and breaths which I combined with the clicks, pops and thuds of the answering machine to echo the sounds of my father and his fingers on the calculator keys those Sunday mornings.

In This World Nothing Is Certain



An Awful Lot Of Beeps pines for the New Wave and Electronic Dance Music of the 1980s, and looks back admiringly at Laurie Anderson’s "O Superman (For Massenet)". While digitizing the found answering machine tape sampled here, I imaged lost callers speaking through an impromptu answering machine intercom, calling out to someone they hoped was listening. I wondered, “What is wrong with Steve? Or with Steve’s mom?”

As Anderson sings:
When love is gone, there is always justice
and when justice is gone, there is always force
and when force is gone, there is always mom.

Chris Dan4th

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