WATIV XX:Twenty Years of Silence

[High Mayhem Newsletter]

Today we are pleased to release WATIV XX: Twenty Years of Silence, a 20 
year retrospective to Baghdad Music Journal. The cassette release 
includes both Twenty Years of Silence as well as Baghdad Music Journal

WATIV XX: Twenty Years of Silence is a sonic confrontation with memory 
and war, a 20-year audio reflection by William A. Thompson IV, a former 
U.S. Army counterintelligence agent deployed to Iraq in 2005.
Side A, composed in 2025, explores how memory lingers not as a narrative 
but as signal, texture, and ghost. These new compositions are built from 
transcribed speech, including fragments of Southern preacher sermons and 
poems by Robert Frost and Walt Whitman that mourn or memorialize fallen 
soldiers. These texts are never directly spoken; instead, they are 
algorithmically transformed into music using symbolic and spectral 
transcription methods, including command-line tools like WAON. The 
resulting works are performed on the Infastain Piano, an augmented 
acoustic instrument designed by the artist using tactile transducers 
mounted to the soundboard.
Side B presents a remastered archival edition of Baghdad Music Journal, 
the original wartime album recorded on deployment. Built from field 
recordings, captured Iraqi radio, and early speech-to-music experiments, 
it was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and profiled in Leonardo 
Music Journal. The work has since been cited in Sound Targets by 
Jonathan Pieslak (Indiana University Press), a major study of soldiers 
and music in the Iraq War.
Together, the two sides form a sonic palimpsest, a magnetic tape 
conversation across decades and states of mind, from battlefield 
immediacy to long-distance aftermath.

Cassette and digital album are available here:  
https://highmayhem.bandcamp.com/album/wativ-xx-twenty-years-of-silence




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