Act Five, Scene One is an hour-long piece that has as its wellsprings two relatively short sections. The first occurs at the beginning of the piece and the second appears at the thirty-minute mark. The rest of the piece largely consists of versionings of this material, with the significant exception of Tony Conrad’s composition-within-a-composition, which I hope makes the plot more interesting.

     Act Five, Scene One borrows its structure from an earlier piece, Thirty-Minute Raven. You could think of it as Thirty-Minute Raven times two. Or you could think of it as an hour-long television drama as compared to the sitcom-length Raven — except that Act Five, Scene One is the more broadly comic, less deadpan of the two.

     Perhaps it also makes sense to think of these pieces in terms of locked grooves. But that only works if you imagine a groove that contains thirty minutes or an hour of sound. Call it repeat-mode rock and roll. We’d made it all the way to the Fifth Act when Scene One got stuck and kept starting over again.

     The Thirty-Minute Raven structure was born of considerations about how to install a four-and-a-half minute piece of recorded music in an exhibition. I really didn’t want to torture the people who worked there. The solution was to have the four-and-a-half minute piece play at the at the beginning of and thirty minutes into an hour-long cycle — a sixty-minute recording set in repeat mode. The intervening time was filled by layering individual percussion elements, scaled to the volume at which you might hear John McEntire shaking a tambourine or playing a triangle in the center of the space. The goal of scaling the percussion elements to their unamplified volumes was to achieve an effect of transparency. When the original four-and-a-half minute piece kicked in on the hour and the half-hour, it functioned like an alarm clock.

     In working on these pieces, I enjoyed becoming attuned to fifteen- and thirty-minute intervals. Your attention is teased, then taxed; the drift begins, and then it’s interrupted by by that perfectly regular signpost. Something like snooze-bar rock and roll. I wanted to strike a balance, making it empty enough to work in repeat-mode listening but not rendering it barren of thrills, spills, chills, quills.

     Act Five, Scene One is freshly risen bread, and I’m reluctant to say more about it.