Beckett's "Not I" is a piece with which I am not familiar, but as I listened to it I found myself hypnotized as the speech in its urgency seemed to drift into the musical mode--all rests and bursts of syncopation--and this caused me to think of an old favorite from my teenage years, a very, very deep cut from the Aphex Twin catalogue.
The track is titled "Words Processed" and was the last cut on a promotional interview disc released in 1994. After several conventional interview segments, Aphex gives us a remix of the interview, distorted beyond any intelligibility, but still (just) recognizable as speech. I put this on mixtapes I made for my friends for years afterwards, but no one else seemed to be as enthralled with it as I.
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