Written for Sam Grinsell for February 2012’s Lucky Dip album project. I wanted to create something that had ties with Sam’s own work (which often consists of improvisations over field recordings) but which at the same time would subvert that. Sam’s music is very beautiful and often very peaceful, so I created a tape part which was aggressive and harsh and made a graphic score to guide Sam loosely through it.
The title is a reference to a story the great Flash designer Josh Davis told at a design conference I went to many years ago in Sydney. He showed us a beautiful, delicate animation in silence and told us how he took it to his sound designer, showed it to him and then, by way of explaining what he wanted said “I want it to kill people”. I loved the idea that something so gentle and beautiful could be so violent and it really summed up what I wanted to do with this piece.