Mostly Other People Do The Killing at Bop Shop Records

Each day, the earth generates numerous destructive and creative events, many of which go by unnoticed by humankind. Volcanoes erupt beneath the sea, glaciers advance and retreat, microorganisms mutate and adapt, yet only when these events disrupt our lives do we call them disasters. A disaster is an anthropological event measured in its human impact, avoidability or inevitability, and our response. Disasters lay bare our values and risk-acceptance: it is a choice to live in a flood zone, to extract natural resources, to rebuild, to make a free-jazz album… Mostly Other People Do the Killing has chosen to do just that: make audible the experience of disaster....

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Each day, the earth generates numerous destructive and creative events, many of which go by unnoticed by humankind. Volcanoes erupt beneath the sea, glaciers advance and retreat, microorganisms mutate and adapt, yet only when these events disrupt our lives do we call them disasters. A disaster is an anthropological event measured in its human impact, avoidability or inevitability, and our response. Disasters lay bare our values and risk-acceptance: it is a choice to live in a flood zone, to extract natural resources, to rebuild, to make a free-jazz album… Mostly Other People Do the Killing has chosen to do just that: make audible the experience of disaster.

The partial meltdown of reactor number 2 at Three Mile Island in 1979, immortalized in the film masterpiece X-Men Origins: Wolverine by Gavin Hood, looms large in the high-cultural fabric of Pennsylvania. Bassist and composer Moppa Elliott’s nuclear re-engineering of the bugaloo is audible in the contrapuntal melodic lines and finely honed electronic sounds, anticipating a future of [nuclear] fusion. Rather than explain the disaster, Elliott’s composition imagines the event backwards, starting with the chaos and high-energy radiation of a nuclear meltdown and slowly achieves containment, as in the “bombs-in-reverse” sequence of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5.

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