Original Program Notes
The sounds in this piece come from a recording of a young boy in El Salvador burying his father, who had been killed by the National Guard. There is the sound of the boy's voice, the shovel digging the grave, and a fly buzzing nearby. In Part 2, there is an additional sound from a 3-scond sample of the guitar playing of Fred Frith.
For the most part, the recording is played back with little electronic alteration or "processing." Rather, the music is made by breaking the original recording into very small events, and stringing these events into musical structures, creating shapes radically different from the original. To use a film analogy, it is as if the frames of a film were re-ordered so that the characters do altogether different actions. Or you might imagine the source sounds as physical objects viewed from different angles. I have placed you not only at different positions around the object, but have made windows of different sizes through which you look, and occasionally curved the galls into lenses of various types.
The choice of sound source comes from my experiences during the 1980s, most of which I spent working in or around El Salvador. During that time I saw a lot of death. And in that culture, which is both Catholic and highly politicized, death gets surrounded with all kinds of trappings that are intended to make it heroic and purposeful. Death is explained as God's will, or as irrelevant since the dead "live on in struggle."
But most of the 70,000 who died were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. They didn't want to die. There was no plan, no glory. Of course, there are many Salvadorans who did die heroically fighting a brutal regime against overwhelming odds. But even for the heroes, there is a starker, more immediate side to their death.
Sooner or Later is about that side. There is a boy and his father is dead. And no angels sang and no one was better because of it and all that is left is this kid and the shovel digging the hole in the ground and the fly. If we want to find beauty here, we must find it in what is really there: the boy, the shovel, the fly. If we look closely, despite the unbearable sadness, we will discover it.
-- Bob Ostertag, 1990
Comentario sobre Sooner or Later (Tarde o temprano)
Los sonidos de esta obra vienen de una grabación de un niño salvadoreño que entierra a su padre quien había sido asesinado por la Guardia Nacional de El Salvador. Tenemos el sonido de la voz del niño, de una mosca zumbando cerca y de una pala sacando mugre y piedras mientras la fosa está siendo cavada. En la segunda parte hay sonidos adicionales de un sample de 20 segundos de una guitarra tocada por Fred Frith.
Cada sección de la obra comienza con una improvisación en un sampler. La mayoría de las veces la grabación original es tocada más o menos en su velocidad original con poco procesamiento. La música está hecha cortando la grabación original en pequeños eventos y ubicándolos en estructuras musicales que crean formas diferentes de los originales.
Para usar una analogía con film, es como si los cuadros de una película fueran reordenados de manera tal que los protagonistas terminan haciendo otras acciones. O uno puede imaginarse las fuentes de los sonidos como objetos físicos vistos desde diferentes ángulos. Yo los he ubicado, no solo en diferentes posiciones alrededor del objeto , sino que también he hecho ventanas de diferentes tamaños a través de las cuales ustedes miran, y ocasionalmente he curvado el vidrio en lentes de varios tipos.
Debido a que la locación del sonido forma un aspecto muy importante en esta obra, escucharla con audífonos o al menos estar sentado a la misma distancia de ambos parlantes es altamente recomendado.
La elección de la fuente de sonido no es incidental, es el resultado de los últimos diez años de mi vida, la mayoría de los cuales estuve en El Salvador. Durante aquel tiempo vi muchas muertes. En aquella cultura, altamente católica y politizada, la muerte es rodeada por toda clase de aderezos que intentan hacerla heroica y con un cierto propósito. La muerte es a menudo explicada como un deseo de Dios, o más aún, como algo irrelevante ya que las víctimas "siguen viviendo en la lucha". Todo es glorioso y heroico.
Pero unas 70000 personas han murieron allí. La mayoría porque estaban en el lugar equivocado en el momento equivocado. No la querían. No estaba planeada. No había gloria.
Hay muchos salvadoreños que sí murieron heroicamente, luchando en contra de un régimen brutal en completa desventaja. Pero aún para los héroes hay un lado más inmediato a sus muertes.
Sooner or Later es sobre ese lado. Hay un niño y su padre está muerto. No hay ángeles que cantan y nadie está mejor por eso, y todo lo que queda es ese chico y la pala cavando la tumba y la mosca zumbando. Si hay belleza, la debemos encontrar en lo que realmente
allí se encuentra: el niño, la pala, la mosca. Si miramos más de cerca, a pesar de la insoportable tristeza, la descubriremos.
Gracias a Sara Miles, Katie Ostertag Miles, Fred Frith, Pierre Herbert, J.A. Deanne y todos los compañeros y compañeras salvadoreños.
Bob Ostertag, 1990
REVIEWS
Bob Ostertag did not simply create a political piece but a musical reality, in which sampling technology is used in a significant way for the first time. The music encircles reality, decomposes it into music and recomposes it until reality is no longer able to escape. It is this clarity that makes Sooner or Later great music, a music that has something to do with life again. -- Die Zeit
Bob Ostertag made his Canadian solo debut at Victoriaville an opportunity to showcase his formidable talents... It was remarkable to see Ostertag seated at the keyboard, alone on the CGEP stage, creating a massive sound sculpture, the mutated sound of a child's crying causing the listener to get a choking sensation in the throat. It is ironic that in an era where the technology of torture and death, smart bombs and their ilk, have allowed some in North America to look away from the obvious and terrible conclusions of war, an artist like Ostertag is able to use simple technology to create such a devastating portrait of human suffering. Frames flew by, hypnotic. -- Coda Magazine
Ostertag's music slices the boy's speech as thin as garlic cut with a razor blade, then blows each instant up into its own requiem. By examining each breath, each impact of shovel to ground under the audio microscope, he magnifies the pain so large as to engulf the listener with a wave of pure empathy while at the same time making art. Listening to this piece is like embracing someone who has no skin, as if the boy was a bare mass of nerves and guts and blood, which stain your own clothes when you touch him." -- High Performance
Text of Source Tape
TranslationPapito chulo. !Malditos! Viendo a mi padre, siento como que en el corazón tengo la bala, compañeros. Prefiero mejor morirme por uno lucha justa, compañeros, y no quedar abandonado compañeros. Mi padre decia... el combatia... era un cambatiente de este pueblo. Me decia que yo no fuera tan despijo. Que yo fuera... tuviera una creatividad and valor, para llegar al final de un triunfo de los compañeros que queden or que quedemos. Ay, compañeros, yo deseo esta sangre, tarde o temprano la voy a vengar.
Sweet Papa. Bastards! Seeing my father, I feel like I have the bullet in my own heart, compañeros. I'd rather die for a just cause than be left abandoned. My father told me... he was a fighter... a fighter for our people. He told me not to be a good-for-nothing, that I should be creative and brave until the final victory of those who survive. Ay, compañeros, sooner or later I will avenge his blood.
Yes, this is a bit off-topic. Yet I feel that this release belongs here, more than to some music-related forum, as it's one of the most daring experimental works I've come across.Bob Ostertag is more a performer-artist than a "simple" musician.
Información en castellano
Official site
You will need to listen to it closely, with headphones; casual listening won't do. It will demand your full attention for 45 minutes.
It will tear your heart in pieces
Really.I've compressed the two tracks with Monkey’s Audio, so you'll have the original .wav files.
Bob Ostertag - Sooner or Later - APE.rar 
I hope the moderators will forgive me for posting a link to an audio file here...
In MP3 with medium bitrate is well.
