Tim Brady - Actions Speak Louder, Act 3: Voices (2021)

Actions speak louder than words, it is often said. And the words we use to describe and categorize music – jazz, rock, tonal, atonal, classical, experimental, world, spectral, minimal, whatever – often focus on the technical and cultural differences between musical actions that are, at their heart, remarkably unified in intent. The act of making music, the passion of composing, the happiness of playing guitar, have always been for me a single continuum of ideas and possibilities, never a series of discrete styles and rules.

The initial COVID-19 crisis in the spring and summer of 2020 gave me the time to think about these ideas, and to create these three interconnected recordings. They explore this fundamental idea of a single musical continuum with three different approaches, but always with the idea of making connections through musical actions, rather than creating divisions through technical discourse.

The titles and simple programme notes give some clues as to how and why the music was created, but I don’t want to talk too much because, after all, actions speak louder…

ACT 3: VOICES: Revolutionary Songs / As It Happened (TK488)
“Revolutionary Songs” is a song-cycle from 1993, exploring the meaning of political revolution from an emotional, personal and historical perspective. It explores the impact of politics and revolution from a personal dimension, rather than from an ideological one. The texts are from poems inspired by the Russian, Angolan, French and Nicaraguan revolutions, in English, French and Spanish. This is a remastered edition of a studio recording done in December 1995.

“As It Happened” combines a near-flawless live recording from October 2000 with multi-channel studio production to create a hybrid musical experience. The work itself is a sonic portrait of the horrifying clandestine CIA-funded, Cold War-era brain washing experiments that took place at the Allen Institute in Montreal in the 1960s. The programme used shock therapy and massive drug injections to destroy people’s memories, and their lives. One of the involuntary subjects of these experiments, Linda MacDonald, recounts her story, and her ultimately successful, decades-long battle for justice against the Canadian government. The text, and her voice, are taken from a 1999 radio interview on the CBC show “As It Happens”. This is a previously unreleased recording.