I don't get headaches very often, but on the afternoon of August 17, 2020—five months into the quarantine—I experienced the worst headache of my life.

At its peak, I repaired to the smallest room in my apartment; during lockdown I had gotten into the frequent habit of sitting on a folding chair in my bedroom closet, mostly for the quiet, secure feeling of occupying a small space (and for a different set of walls to look at)—on this day, I was trying to blot out all sensation.

So, there I sat, head in a vice, thoughts gloomily drifting (as they would in those days), when the whole of my perception was engulfed in a sudden black flash; a night-terror-in-the-afternoon that had me believing, for a vivid split second, that I was dead; I had died; my clothes were empty; I’d dipped out of the existence game; I’d seen my empty shell and heard the words spoken (in no voice): "I am a dead man."

It was weird.

Later that evening, feeling much better (physically), and thinking about my earlier experience, I realized that, while I had been working non-stop on finishing _Ships Of Theseus_—which would become my first release as HANDS HOLDING THE VOID, if only in name—I still hadn't created any art in direct response to the bizarre time we were all living through (waking death-dreams notwithstanding), so I grabbed a notebook and sat down to compose an automatic poem about all of it.

Not being an actual poet, what I found myself writing was, essentially, a bullet list of sights, sounds, and other assorted minutiae of my hermetically sealed pandemic existence.

Before I put the pen down, I’d arrived at the idea to turn the list-poem—otherwise useless—into a piece of chance-based music.

Chance music was something I'd wanted to explore for years, but I'd never had an artistic reason or problem to solve that required it (not to this extent, anyway). Finally, I had found legitimate entrée into the practice.

I got right to work.

First, I spent several days plotting out and recording all the requisite chance operations and instructions and plugging them into a spreadsheet. Using this "score," I transposed the words of the poem into a sequence of pitches and rhythms for 6 virtual instruments, chosen at random from a selection of free plugins (Spitfire LABS). Woven into the instrumentation was text-to-speech audio of my original "poem," stretched and warped alongside sounds of the summer, recorded via smartphone: ambient street noise; a mockingbird recorded at 3 o’clock in the morning; and the exact moment a few days earlier that an intense derecho—the same one that flattened fields in Iowa before producing several tornadoes on Chicago’s North side—blasted my old building as sirens wailed across the city.

The result was spare, stilted, and unsettling; a perfect depiction of the abstract, creeping dread and festering mundanity involved in experiencing a deadly global pandemic in total isolation, all encased in a fleetingly beautiful piece of minimalist music. As soon as I played it back, I knew I'd stumbled upon a new way to compose; there wouldn't be any going back to the old method of puzzling out predetermined ideas on a guitar.

What about that title? It is a reference to the cut-up nature of the composition (and my apparent death), as well as a shout-out to the house centipedes that at this point felt more like roommates than intruders when they’d join me during my many insomnious nights; them, circling frantically above the picture rails; me, pacing the floor in my own nervous patterns below. I soon came to refer to my living room as "The Centipede Gallery."

I didn't include _An Exquisite Corpse In The Centipede Gallery_ on the s/t HANDS HOLDING THE VOID album it spawned because it didn’t quite jibe with its more sophisticated offspring, but here it is, unheard after a year and a half, the humble little track that changed my art and revealed my mission statement; a fever dream from the dead heat of our pandemic summer of 2020; a time capsule of a strange era I will not soon forget.

George J. Fero, Jr. (HANDS HOLDING THE VOID)
February 3, 2022

Tracks:

1. An Exquisite Corpse In The Centipede Gallery (2020) - 5:14

Composed, produced, mixed and mastered August-September 2020

2. Demo Music For A Cult Pod 1 (Bonkers Loop, 2018) - 2:57

3. Demo Music For A Cult Pod 2 (Main Theme Loop, 2018) - 2:00

4. Demo Music For A Cult Pod 3 (Nowhere, 2001/2018) - 4:18

Composed, produced, mixed and mastered April-May 2020

The three bonus tracks were recorded in the spring of 2018 when the opportunity arose (and quickly evaporated) to produce and compose for a documentary podcast.

As it happens, in putting together demo 2 (Main Theme Loop), I decided to use some basic information about the podcast's subject(s)—initials and such—to apply chance operations to the key and time signatures; this was long before the HANDS HOLDING THE VOID concept, and I had no intention at the time of adopting chance operations in any regular fashion, but I think a seed must have been planted, which, for me, totally justifies the inclusion of these otherwise abandoned demos as HANDS HOLDING THE VOID bonus material—including a track, _Nowhere_, that shouldn't qualify at all because I wrote the original version way back in early 2001...

At any rate, I think these demos, alongside _An Exquisite Corpse…_, serve nicely to conclude the series of EPs that tell the HANDS HOLDING THE VOID "origin story." Now, on to new projects. -G