brendan getz

Pythia (whale record)

6 : 56

notes for a whale record

Pythia (whale record)

sound object, six minutes, fifty-six seconds

sourced and sampled from Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970),

a collection of research and field recordings

by Dr. Roger S. Payne

Forest Lawn Museum

cathedral nave

in collaboration with Kim Schoen’s video, Oracles,

Pythia (whale record) hovers

around the oracular pronouncement referenced in the Oracles work, “think as a mortal,”

thinking with Pythia, the high priestess medium for Apollo

a mediated voice on a record

out of reach for recognition

performed through resonance

in the cathedral nave,

itself already a reproduction,

sound stays beyond its source,

becomes something else,

one medium through another,

where the a-side and b-side meet