Earlier today, The Moderns played ‘Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds (Performance #2)’ by my Mortality Tables project as part of their latest episode. 

themoderns.blog/2024/03/31/the-moderns-ep-308/

To celebrate that, here are some 50% discount codes which can be used at the checkout at mortalitytables.bandcamp.com:

Performance #1 – ivesone
Performance #2 – ivestwo

I feel like this piece requires some explanation. 

On face value, ‘Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds’ is just an eight-and-a-half minute field recording from Central Park in New York, beautifully mastered by Alex from the quiet details label. There’s more to it than meets the ear, and its development has occupied me almost ceaselessly since 2021. 

The location of the recording isn’t random. It is derived from your age and your life expectancy in 1874. I made a special map of Central Park divided up into areas corresponding to those life expectancies, and the ‘performer’ makes the recording in that area. 

Why 1874? That was the year that the American radical composer Charles Ives was born. One of his compositions was ‘Central Park In The Dark’ (1906), with which Ives intended to evoke the sounds of the park that he heard while sat on a bench not far from his apartment on Central Park West. Incidentally, Ives is the guy with the beard in the illustration by Savage Pencil that gave Mortality Tables its entire visual identity. 

Why life expectancies? That’s because being a composer wasn’t Ives’s main occupation. For the majority of his working life, Ives worked in life insurance, way Downtown on Nassau Street, near Wall Street.

Why eight-and-a-half minutes? Because that’s how long the first recorded version of ‘Central Park In The Dark’ (made in 1951) lasted. 

The intention is to publish the instructions for making a performance / recording of ‘Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds’, along with more details about Ives and his work in both music and insurance, in October of this year.

A couple of other explanations, maybe. A list of life expectancies is called a mortality table. You may now see where the name Mortality Tables comes from. And my main occupation involves working with insurance companies. That’s why Ives is important to me, as an inspiration, and as a role model.

– Mat

(c) 2024 Mortality Tables / Further.