Staring Through the Edge of Time
| Staring Through the Edge of Time | ||||
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| Released | 2016–2017 | |||
| Recorded | 2016–2017 | |||
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| Length | 667:06 | |||
| Label | Ship of Theseus | |||
| Producer | Jackie Tammy Langley | |||
| The Ballroom Ghost chronology | ||||
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Staring Through the Edge of Time (abbreviated by fans as STTEOT) is a series of albums, from the seventh to thirteenth studio albums, by The Ballroom Ghost, an alias of Sierran artist Jackie Tammy Langley exploring mental health, philosophy, and memory. Released into six parts across the span of nearly fourteen months, the series was conceived and created by Langley in response to witnessing her father's struggle with Huntington's disease, a mostly inherited neurodegenerative disease. Each part represents a stage of Huntington's disease, along with its symptoms (such as chorea and dementia) as well as the final stage, death. The first three parts of the series mainly comprises big band jazz records and orchestral compositions, which gradually degrades in compositional quality, coherence, tone, melody, and fluidity. Starting with the fourth part, the music in the series becomes progressively more distorted, rigid, dissonant, and neurotic, and vocal samples become more frequent, before climaxing into a cacophonic explosion of noise music, followed immediately by a closing marked with a cascade towards softer ambience and finally, silence.
The series mark a departure from Langley's previous albums under the alias of The Ballroom Ghost, as previous releases were based on repeated melodies and remixes of pop music, as the last three albums have been compared to noise music, particularly dark ambience and harsh noise wall. Langley described the series as her "most personal project" as she included samples of her father's audio recordings, who has been hypothesized by critics as the subject of the series. At the time of the series' release, Langley's father's condition with Huntington's disease had progressed into dementia, following a period of schizophrenic-like symptoms and motor skill loss. Langley personally chose not to receive genetic testing to determine if she had an expanded copy of the trinucleotide repeat (CAG) in the HTT gene responsible for causing Huntington's disease.
Each of the albums in the series were released sixty-six days apart, from the release of Stage 1 in October 2016 to Stage 6 in December 2017. The series was met with mostly positive reception, with greater praise given to the final three albums for their experimental sound and quality. The album covers which accompany each part are oil paintings created by Langley's boyfriend, Henry Sangild, which were selected to encapsulate the mood and theme of each "year" in the series.
Background
The Ballroom Ghost was a musical project and alias created by Jackie Tammy Langley to explore themes of mental health. The pseudonym based music on samples of vinyl songs from the 1920s to the 1950s. The project was inspired initially from Langley's own personal experiences with mental health and her time as a social worker in Grands Ballons where she encountered people of various pathologies. The project's debut album, When the War Rages On was a compilation of 64 tracks exploring post-traumatic stress disorder, and featured a similar concept of linear deterioration.
In 2014, the Ballroom Ghost released An Unrecognizable Face in the Mirror, an album based on amnesia and memory loss, which gained positive critical reception and some commercial success. The popularity of the project, as well as the subsequent diagnosis for Huntington's disease for Langley's father, motivated Langley to further explore themes of memory loss. According to Langley, her father's prognosis was only five years and the "brevity of [her] father's truncated lifespan" prompted her to document her father's experience with Huntington's through sound and music as she had done with sufferers from other mental health issues.
The first three stages are representative of Langley's earlier work from previous albums, where she sampled pre-GWI ballroom and big band vinyl records and looped them. Each stage would get progressively more distorted in sound and quality in an attempt to imitate the brain and body's decline in motor skills, cognitive thought, and memory caused by Huntington's. Human vocals, an element of music Langley tended to avoid including in her work, begins appearing in Stage 2 and becomes more frequent and aggressive as it progresses towards Stage 4. This element was included to reflect the symptoms of schizophrenia which her father and a significant portion of other Huntington's disease patients experience.
Concept, composition, and production
The project is presented as a multi-stage audio "narrative" depicting a person going through the progressively worsening stages of Huntington's disease. Ideas of deterioration, anger, denial, confusion, melancholy, depression, and abstractness are present. The initial albums feature both traditionally structured, looped songs and abstract ambience. Music in the later stages become increasingly avant-garde and experimental. Throughout the album, certain songs and leitmotifs recur, such as samples of the song "Valencia". The quality, timbre, and clarity of the sample becomes more degraded at every instance it is reintroduced in the project's progression.
At each stage, the music becomes more distorted and abstract. The jazz and big band style of music in the first three stages is reminiscent of Langley's earlier works, which loops vinyl records and wax cylinders. On Stage 3, the song samples are shorter and the transition between songs are more abrupt, often occurring in the middle of a loop, without the use of a fade-out. The two penultimate stages and the first third of the final stage is full of chaotic noise and dissonant sounds, representing the confusion, distress, and suffering of the patient. The final two-thirds of the final stage consists of drones and periods of silence, representing the numbness and terminality of the patient.
Stage 1
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This song samples a 1926 cover of "Valencia" by vocalist Paul Whiteman, and other versions of this song continue to reappear throughout the project |
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According to Langley, Stage 1 depicts the initial signs of physical and mental deterioration. She describes it as "the fringe ends of a life of normalcy" and the "earnest desire to live life to its fullest". It features opening seconds and sequences of records from the 1920s and '30s looped for long lengths. The samples are distorted primarily by pitch, reverberation, overtones, and vinyl crackle. Some songs abruptly change while others transition more smoothly. The overall mood and tone of the first stage is "fuzzy and nostalgic" as described by Langley, although signs of melancholy are present throughout the sampling and the titling as in the instance of the track "Never mind those worries".
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4
Stage 5
Stage 6
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In this song, "Valencia" has been paul-stretched beyond recognition |
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Artwork
Critical reception
Track listing
All tracks are written by Jackie Tammy Langley.
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | ""In a magic dream of memory"" | 3:21 |
| 2. | ""Enjoying my time"" | 2:20 |
| 3. | ""It's a world of color"" | 2:58 |
| 4. | ""Swimming down Santa Ana"" | 3:11 |
| 5. | ""Oh to be young"" | 3:33 |
| 6. | ""The passion of longevity"" | 1:55 |
| 7. | ""Darling forevermore"" | 4:15 |
| 8. | ""Never mind those worries"" | 3:38 |
| 9. | ""I will never stop smiling"" | 6:01 |
| 10. | ""Staying positive"" | 3:33 |
| 11. | ""Opening my umbrella"" | 4:04 |
| Total length: | 38:49 | |
Personnel
- Jackie Tammy Langley – production
- Henry Sangild – covers
- Scripulous Fingore – mastering
- Doglander – vinyl/CD distribution