Donuts

Is death real? This simple question haunts this record, as it's carefully composed from the hospital bed. A circuit is formed with four components comprising its machinic assemblage. It begins with the composer and ends with the listener. Between the composer and listener lies a coupling of a record player and a Boss SP-303 sampler. I won't pretend to know the names of the records, I can only describe in passing how they're cast from their original context and assembled through slices and ablations. It's a final surgical procedure, where J Dilla is able to challenge the seeming permanence of death through the fabrication of one final record.

The sampler is an instrument without an image of its own. It's a hall of mirrors with which one sculpts time. The sampler doesn't sound like itself, through perfect digital reproduction it creates manipulable spectres that can be sequenced and organized according to the whims of the composer. The record player is able to fashion unique sounds of its own through accelerations and decelerations. If the sampler is a cutting tool that treats sound as solid blocks, the record player allows sound to become a fluid whose flows can be sped and slowed. All other functions of the sampler are strictly ornamental. Its specificity is its command over temporality.

Dilla's samples stomp and scream. They dance and play. They get up and move. They remember to put the kids to bed. With swift, defiant movements they rip out the IVs and let out 32 years of accumulated joy, grief, and all vestiges of resignation, to yell triumphant in the infinite space of circular time. Donuts challenges death by refusing its silence. With the accumulated voices of decades of records all cry in one voice the clamor of being. It's a record that demands of the listener to resist the temptation to live as if one is already dead, and to question its very possibility. Thus, we return to the question we started with. Is death real?

333 words.