The Platypus Music Hour is 100% memory-powered. Plato (no relation) believed that all true knowledge was derived from a form of memory called anamnesis, which could be accessed only intuitively, by “contemplation with the soul.” Such contemplation was thought to be cathartically purifying of all bias and desire. Later neoplatonists, like Plotinus and Porphyry, elaborated on Plato’s idea by locating the act of recollection not in the mind itself but in the world-soul.

Many years later, Marcel Proust echoed Plato in calling stark attention to the involuntary quality of memory, while at the same time persuasively demonstrating memory’s unavoidably creative nature. Every memory is a new being, and yet it is constructed effortlessly, and of an instant; simultaneously brand new and eternal. Simultaneously improbable and inevitable.

Each episode of The Platypus Music Hour begins with a song chosen by the playlist’s curator. This song is passed to the first of a rotating series of participants, who is tasked with allowing herself to remember or evoke some other song. This new song is then forwarded to another rememberer, who repeats the process. No single participant can see any further backwards or forwards than the single song he is given, or the single song she responds with.

Like the word game where you change  L-E-A-D  to  G-O-L-D  one letter at a time, The Platypus Music Hour changes one song at a time, starting from, let’s say, The Boswell Sisters, and ending with, say, The Ventures, Grace Jones, Tito Rossi, or Gorecki. Improbable yet inevitable, uncreated by any single mind, alchemized into being by an unorganized but related–and possibly fated–collection of private memory experiences.

Twitter: @platmus
Email: platypusmusic AT mail DOT com

Uploading my record archives in order to sell them in central Tokyo.  When you don't want to upload the site, please inform. / レコードや音源を他の方にお譲りする目的で掲載します。掲載を望まない場合は連絡願います。

Theater Oobleck is an artistic collective dedicated to producing and performing original works of theater for the benefit of, and at low or no cost to, the members of the Chicago community and beyond. All our works are created and developed by members of the Oobleck ensemble, working in concert to create a collaborative vision without an overseeing director. We have produced about seventy world-premiere productions over the past twenty-seven years, as well as eighteen remounts of earlier productions. 

Followers of DQ Slotkins