You’re in us

12” dubplate, pigment print on paper
2012

Οὐρανός, or Ouranos is the Greek god of the sky and the name for the planet Uranus, the Latinized version of the Greek. It has two common pronunciations but I prefer the Greek pronunciation, which sounds a little like: “you’re in us”

The work is a 12” dubplate, a one-off acetate disc with a 24min sound track recorded onto the disc using a recording lathe. It uses the iconic image of Uranus taken by Voyager 2 in 1986, as its label. Uranus has 9 distinct rings that surround the planet. These rings are represented on the dubplate by combining sequences of sound with silence, which is visible as the rough and smooth areas on the surface of the dubplate. The sound is taken from a number of different recordings of the sixth movement (Uranus, the Magician) of Gustav Holst’s seven-movement orchestral suite, “The Planets, Op. 32,” and remixed so that the location, the empty space between the rings represented by the silence in the recording, and duration, the width of the rings composed of matter and represented by sound on the dubplate correspond to the location and width of the rings surrounding the planet.
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Ouranos married his mother. Together they produced six sons and six daughters. Ouranos hated his children causing the mother to suffer for long periods. Feeling trapped, the mother pleaded with her children to do something. One night, while the mother and father slept together, the youngest son slipped into their room and without hesitating cut off his father’s testicles with a large knife and threw the severed testicles into the sea where they floated like white froth in the moonlight.