David (Timefeel) (2018)

[Audio element. Duration 12:22]

"I'm on Fire" was one of the many singles from Bruce Springsteen's “Born in the USA” album. Its melancholic tone betrays the fact that it was written in the sessions for "Nebraska", the stripped down collection of songs The Boss mythologically recorded solo on a 4-track portastudio in advance of his mid-80s rise to global superstardom. On its release, “I'm on Fire” was accompanied by a cinematic video directed by John Sayles, in which a mechanic (Bruce) drops a car off to a wealthy female customer who lives in a house in the leafy suburbs.

The songs elements are basic: voice, drums, synth and a guitar with rockabilly slap-back echo. Like Prince's "When Doves Cry", there is no bassline. The human voice is placed in dialogue with the electric guitar's electromechanical technology and the synth's digital electronics. Bruce sits between the Newtonian cause-and-effect of the gold standard and the quantuum weirdness of rapidly accelerating and increasingly unregulated market speculations.

Fragments of the original track, which is a mere two and a half minutes long, are rearranged here in the manner of a Disco-Edit to produce hypnotic repetitions that frame a human voice snagged in the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism.

David (Timefeel) was produced for the exhibition TTOPOLOGY at VISUAL, Carlow, Ireland with the support of the Arts Council of Ireland.