Art School Alumni Deconstructing Music as a Whole

         Jeff Talbot, 24, is set to rock the music world to its very foundation, until it’s left a huddling, slowly vibrating mass of unimaginative resentment. In February of 2013, Talbot will release his “Aria of Deconstruction”, a “comment on the state of music in the post-modern world.”

            Talbot, an arts major stifled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt after graduating from a small arts college in May of 2011, found himself in a situation much like any other recent graduate following the 2008 financial crisis. Jobless and destitute, with no marketable skills and a degree that had been reduced to the equivalent worth of a piece of tissue paper rolled covered in gorilla glue and rolled around in some confetti, Talbot needed to find a way to subsist – and he’s done just that.

The New Venture Follows Talbot's
Lucrative Career as a Teen
Model for IStockPhoto.com

            A lifelong love affair with music, or “the aural arts” as he calls them, Talbot discovered that his senior thesis could itself be converted into a thirty minute composition that will change the way the music industry operates and, in the process, net him billions and billions of dollars. “It’s a study in minimalism and deconstruction,” said Talbot, as he Googled the word minimalism, “a Performative criticism encompassing the critical trappings and false starts of post-modern complexity.”

            The project got off to a rough start, said Talbot’s mother Maude, who has been hosting the young artist in her office (formerly his childhood bedroom) for the past two years. “He played the same note over and over for hours,” said Maude, “an E, I think.” These early experiments, Talbot tells us, were not merely the mindless plucking of the E string of a guitar, but instead a cutting parody of Delta Blues musicians.

            Talbot’s Aria began as a collage of every song in his impressive ITunes collection. After importing all 65,000 songs into his copy of Garage Band on his Macbook Pro, Talbot began the arduous process of panning each an every song to specific places between the left and right speaker based on what he terms a “crescendo of prime numbers.” Following the completion of this musical pastiche, the real work could commence. Talbot set about reducing the cacophony of noises he had created into a single note that could then be played over another note, and successively played over more and more notes until the sound was properly reproduced in the form of an aria.

            “At first, it just came out as Aqua Lung by Jethro Tull,” said Talbot, “but I think I’m getting closer now.”

            Once the finishing touches have been put on the project, Talbot will burn it to a CD, bring that CD over to his friend Malcolm’s apartment over his mother’s garage, import into Malcolm’s ITunes and record it playing off of Malcolm’s speakers onto a four track cassette recorder. “It’s a startling work of genius,” said Malcolm as he adjusted his wig, “I can’t wait to hear any of it.”

            The recording will then be duplicated, and the ensuing 500 copies sent to every major and independent music label in the world in order to, as Talbot puts it, “blow there minds. Then the money will come,” he says, “then the money will come.”