NEW: Oxen of the Sun (ULYSSES part 20) by Dr. Melis & Dr. Robert (2023)

Oxen of the Sun is the twentieth part of the 24-hour composition ULYSSES.
ULYSSES is a 24 hours composition by Francesc D. Melis and Antoni Robert Gadea.
The project was conceived after the release of L’Esquellot ben Trempat (by Dr. Melis & Dr. Robert), now available at antonirobert.bandcamp.com/album/lesquellot-ben-trempat. In this previous release I composed a work using previously recorded sound material played by Francesc and by myself, combining pieces of sound according to a conceptual guideline. The big amount of sounds available made me think about how to use a relevant part of it, since the process of doing it was very pleasant. As a result of those thoughts and a reference seen by chance of one of my favourite books, James Joyce’s ULYSSES, the idea came soon after: a 24 hours work inspired by Leopold Bloom / Stephen Dedalus 24 hours Dublin wandering. The novel has 18 episodes and 12 locations, while I have broken down the sound in 24 parts (corresponding to the 24 hours). So the 24 parts do not correspond exactly to the episodes or locations, although they follow the novel timeline and path.
The division in parts is necessary because it is not practical to share a 24 hours wav file. It is too big. But as a concept the work is a continuous 24 hours sound flow. Each part begins with a long fade in and ends with a long fade out. Summing up all the durations you will find more than 24 hours. But the work is intended to run for exactly 24 hours. So, the correct way of listening to it is to overlap each fade out with the next part fade in, in a way that the final duration, once all the 24 parts are overlapped, is exactly 24 hours. In order to do that you will have to do the overlapping with a software in a hard disk and connect the hard disk to a player. There’s no other way to store such a big file. Each complete work will be slightly different, because the way of doing the overlapping will have small variations each time. But this is not a problem at all.
ULYSSES is a long soundscape. Some parts are dark ambient, some are noisy, some are electroacoustic or concrete. Most of the sound sources are by the authors, but some other sources have been used, and the musicians are credited when necessary.
The unicorn appears as a reminder that the original working title was “A day in the life of Ulysses, a lonely heart unicorn”.
The work will be released in 24 parts, one part a day along 24 days.
Enjoy it!
Antoni Robert
Bloom visits the maternity hospital where Mina Purefoy is giving birth, and finally meets Stephen, who has been drinking with his medical student friends and is awaiting the promised arrival of Buck Mulligan. As the only father in the group of men, Bloom is concerned about Mina Purefoy in her labour. He starts thinking about his wife and the births of his two children. He also thinks about the loss of his only ‘heir’, Rudy. The young men become boisterous, and start discussing such topics as fertility, contraception and abortion. There is also a suggestion that Milly, Bloom’s daughter, is in a relationship with one of the young men, Bannon. They continue on to a pub to continue drinking, following the successful birth of a son to Mina Purefoy. This chapter is remarkable for Joyce’s wordplay, which, among other things, recapitulates the entire history of the English language. After a short incantation, the episode starts with latinate prose, Anglo-Saxon alliteration, and moves on through parodies of, among others, Malory, the King James Bible, Bunyan, Pepys, Defoe, Sterne, Walpole, Gibbon, Dickens, and Carlyle, before concluding in a Joycean version of contemporary slang. The development of the English language in the episode is believed to be aligned with the nine-month gestation period of the foetus in the womb.