This is a stereo mix of a piece originally commissioned by Diffusion Festival in 2022, and was premiered there in it's original quadrophonic mix.

The live performance involves a live speaker uttering every other line of the text, effectively hocketing at times with the lines of dialogue being 'spoken' by the speakers (a recording of the speakers voice).

The text I used had it's original form as a much longer, rambling ''play'' for two live speakers, sans music, which I subsequently cut down and reshaped into little vignettes, pairing them with little electroacoustic vignettes to produce Elephant.
It consistently refers to a live audience being present, which doesn't make an abundance of sense when you're listening to it in your living room, but anyway.

The music was produced during a quick learning curve regarding all things making-music-on-a-computer related, most notably spatialization. Learning hotkeys was good.
Tossing samples of anything from Morton Feldman to Starfuckers into a DAW was at first a means of practicing processing and layering (and fun?) that eventually turned into a full-on compositional process once I started pairing what I was producing with the text. Mostly textural material - the extended tonal parts of this are processed banks of sine waves tuned to La Monte Young's Well Tuned Piano.
Sampling anything under the sun resulted in a odd sort of plunderphonics-style that I don't currently see any reason to ever revisit, and which has personal artistic/ethical implications that I'm still fairly perplexed by, but ultimately they really have nothing to do with the piece (at least in the way I see it). I started being moved by how some of it was sounding, so I just went with it.
Got-it-out-of-my-system kind of thing.

The 'place' you revisit again and again in this is the Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji, a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monastery located in the Catskills where my grandfather Norman Hoegberg was ordained as a monk, and where I had a notable experience not long before I started working on Elephant that heavily informed my thinking during the time in which I was writing the text. The knocking, gongs and chants you occasionally hear are the sounds of the morning rituals the monks busy themselves with daily.

I enjoyed imagining that I was listening to my grandfather as I listened to the monks chanting while mixing certain sections, as he would have been amongst them had these field recordings been made in 1977.

The field recordings of the Zendo were made by a fellow on Youtube named Alec Davis. Thanks Alec!

(note - i've split this into sections only as an appeal, so as to make it's duration seem less daunting. the stops and starts are frankly arbitrary. please listen to the entirety on good speakers, if you can. or consider it a kind of audiobook, if that helps)

List of musicians/composers sampled in order of their first appearances:
Michael Schumacher
Mark Fell
Guerilla Toss
Beatrice Dillon
John Hudak
John Cage
Dirk Wachtelaer
Alvin Lucier
Chris Watson
Thomas Lehn
Paul Lovens
Horacio Vaggione
Scott Walker
Monty Python
Vandermark 5
Steve Reid
Amelia Cuni
Iannis Xenakis
Lou Harrison

Thanks to M.C. Schmidt and Jeff Carey