2008 CD of project between Hemlock Smith & les Poissons Autistes, gatefold, limited 500 copies first edition, almost out of print
Includes unlimited streaming of Hemlock Smith & les Poissons Autistes: "Three Times Dead"
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Ok. Eh, well, my name is William J. Pratt, and I'm, what you would call a legal examiner for the County of Hillsboro, State of, well, you know where we are…
My job is basically…to examine dead bodies as a physician and to determine the cause of death.
My work is fairly routine, I guess, most of it being cancer, old age and heart attacks. But every once in a while, you stumble upon something that is fairly odd and eh…disconcerting. This is the moment where you would find yourself starting to investigate …to find out whether or not there is a suspicion of a wrongful death. In those cases, you collaborate quite strongly with the Police force, so this is the interesting part of my job, the most difficult and rewarding cases being those involving any sorts of poison and drugs.
Well, you know, I only meet my customers after they're gone, so to speak, so human contact is kind of limited, you know. You have to touch them in the most intimate places, cut them open sometimes and yet, you never meet them. The secrets you discover are mostly the ones they were trying to hide, but you could still only guess what this person was really about, you know…
A fantasy of mine? Ha… Of course, when you're young, you always dream of some sort of miracle, you know, a young person supposed to be dead that you would be able, in the nick of time, to ressuscitate…you see…but once you get older, those fantasies tend to fade. They're just not realistic I guess, and in this work, you become very, eh…very, very realistic.
No, eh..I'd say that my hope would be to find out about the human heart. You know, this is an almost perfect machine, fascinating, very complex, but still working 24 hours a day for numerous decades. So it would be…interesting, you know… to find out what actually makes it stop. Not technically of course, because we know all that, but more…eh.. philosophically speaking. The grief, the loneliness, the lack of hope, the disappointment. What brings it to the point where it becomes too much to bear?
And also, on the other hand, what makes a person so heartless as to kill another human being? What brings on the rage, frustration, hatred to make this happen? And what does this heart, this wonderful machine, feel afterwards…anguish, guilt, fear? Or nothing at all…?
So, these are the questions that go through my head while I look at them, day after day, year after year. I examine them, I try to understand them, I search their souls, and mostly you know, what you find is silence…silence and the screaming void.
But this suits me fine you know. I'm a God-fearing, quiet man, I've got my family and they know almost nothing about what I do, or why I'm doing it. I guess they really prefer not to ask any questions. So I go on with my business, examining people as tactfully as I possibly can; I'm hovering over those bodies, like the vulture, like the gravedigger that I am, wondering if, one day, in any mysterious way, one of them will speak to me… But hey, I figure, as long as they're not talking, at least, they're telling the truth, I guess…
(Well, that's it. I'm done, I reckon'… You can stop that thing now…
You can stop that thing…
You can stop that thing…)
* "Transcript of original sound recording made in February 2008, at Hillsboro Public Library, on a dictaphone. Voice of William J. Pratt used by his kind permission".
Hemlock Smith come from Lausanne (Switzerland). Since 2002, they’ve released 7 regular albums with intelligent pop, as well
as 2 soundtracks for silent film and 2 collaborations with Noise duo Les Poissons Autistes. Fronted by singer-songwriter Michael Frei, Hemlock Smith's distinctive voice is complemented by a talented band seamlessly blending Pop, Folk, Rock and Trip-Hop Sensibilities...more
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