Each of the remixes on half-pint demigod depends, to varying degrees, upon the listener being aware of the original versions of the four songs from "Any Raw Flesh?" in order to fully "get" what's going on at all of the different technical and conceptual levels involved. For "Truth (Memento Mix)" to fully work as intended, however, the listener doesn't just need an understanding of the original recording of "Truth" - they need a working knowledge of a movie which wasn't released until long after "Any Raw Flesh?" had been completed.

A very short and cursory description of the film "Memento" would go something like this: the story is about a man with no short-term memory, who can't remember anything beyond a few minutes in the past, who is trying to track down the man who raped and murdered his wife. The main bulk of the film is told in reverse-chronological order: in other words, the first scene viewers see in the movie is the last scene which occurs in the actual chronology of events in the movie, and subsequent scenes which occur "later" in the viewer's experience of the movie occur "earlier" in the chronology of the film's narrative flow.

(Here's an easier way of describing it: if the events of the narrative of the film are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, then the scenes as they actually play out in the technical unfolding of the film, as experienced by the viewer, would be in opposite order - 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.)

I was blown away by "Memento" on a number of levels. But the thing that struck me most profoundly about the film was not the technical and conceptual wizardry involved, and not even the way that its structure provided a jaw-dropper of a plot that couldn't have been told in a "normal" way. Rather, I was most affected by the enormously profound commentary that I felt the plot, and its shocking climax/twist, made on everyday human behavior (and the lives of creative people in particular.) Not many of us are able to relate to having a spouse raped and murdered, or to losing our short-term memory (fortunately!). But nearly all of us choose - on various levels, and on a daily basis - to willfully ignore certain truths in our lives, and to make decisions that sabatoge our own happiness, because we'd rather live with the familiarity of our difficulties than face the unknown mystery that liberating ourselves from those problems would create.

Trust me, all of this undergraduate-style quasi-philosophy really does relate to the "Memento" mix.

At some point after seeing the film (twice in as many days), I was struck by an idea: what would it be like to take the reverse-chronology structure of "Memento" and apply it to a piece of music? The fact that a remix album of Yogi music was on the table seemed like a good incentive to try this approach; the fact that I was introduced to the film by Yogi himself was definitely an extra step in that direction. (As of this writing, in November of 2005, the only time I've ever spent with Shawn in person was two hours in a movie theater, catching the film on his recommendation.)

In theory, this seemed like a pretty straightforward technical premise: Shawn sent me the instrument files for every track from the "Truth" multitrack tapes, I lined them up on my computer, so that the entire original version of "Truth" played normally, and then I chopped up each section and reversed the sequential order of the parts.

The problem here wasn't so much the technical effort - as the remixes go, this preliminary aspect was very straightforward, if a bit time-consuming. The problem was that simply running the different sections from the original version in opposite order didn't sound all that great. Many of the transitions between different sections were very abrupt, in ways that didn't seem musical to me, and the track as a whole didn't make a whole lot of creative sense as anything other than an abstract technical exercise.

So I granted myself some creative license, and started messing with things. The overall reverse structure remained - in a very broad sense, the remix starts with the end of "Truth" and progressed to the beginning - but I began changing the placement of different elements within the remix. A vocal line from one section was suddenly put over a completely different song section from the one it was originally sung over. Two different halves of two different guitar riffs would be spliced together to form some new hybrid part. The drums would completely vanish for gaps of the song.

Fortunately for the art-school graduate in me, this "creative license" technique not only helped the remix to stand on its own as a piece of music, but it also tied into a key plot point of "Memento." The main character, who is unable to formulate new memories following an accident, clings to his pre-accident memories as a bastion of stability in his post-accident life. Without the ability to remember new events, it is his recollection of his existence prior to his accident that gives him his purpose and drive... except that, as the film gradually reveals, his pre-accident memories are NOT entirely accurate - facts from his life have been distorted, and different people's histories have been cross-polinated and projected onto one another.

So aside from the broad structural idea, the "Truth" remix mirrors the film in another way: it's readilly identifiable as "Truth," but it's not an accurate representation - different parts of the song have been jumbled, melded together, and in some cases rendered almost unrecognizable through their distortion. For people who know the original version well, this remix should offer a whopping dose of cognitive dissonance.

More conspicuously, the remix is punctuated by a keening siren-like wail, taken from part of a guitar part and stretched out to many times its original length, which creeps into different sections of the song. This was a specific bid to emulate one of the key musical/sonic elements from the original "Memento" score which appears during moments of intensity and crises; as Shawn later observed, it also functioned like a kind of "Greek chorus," sort of meta-commenting on the remix in a self-reflexive manner.

Ironically, though, the aspect of "Truth (Memento Mix)" that I'm proudest of is one that I'm not sure I can take credit for. Hearing the finished track back now, the thing that strikes me the most is the absolutely uncanny way in which the lyrics for the song seem to completely comment on the actual story and action within the movie.

Have a look at these lyrics, which show up at the end of the "Truth" remix:

Did I paint you into a corner?
Did I leave you for dead?
Are you sure this is all really happening,
Or is it all in your head?

Did I paint you into a corner?
Did I leave you no choice?
Did I turn my deaf ear towards you,
While you screamed away your voice?

I thought by now it'd be really obvious
Where my head was at
I kept hoping you'd never want the truth;
There could be nothing worse for you than that

It's hard for me to imagine someone coming up with lyrics that summed up the plot of the film, and the positions the characters find themselves in at the end of the movie, more poetically and dead-on accurately than this. It's not just the lyrics at the beginning of the original/end of the remix, either: the entire song has lines which can be read as relating to the plot and meaning of the film.

The fact that it comes from a song written years before either Shawn or I saw "Memento" is pretty eerie, and although I'd love to take credit for having this angle in mind ahead of time, I don't think I was really aware of the way in which the lyrical content of the song would relate to the film when I chose it for a "Memento" remix. Maybe that kind of happy accident is what happens when you use a film based on themes of conscious and unconscious choices as the template for a remix.

Obviously, there's more than enough conceptual and philosophical material behind the making of this remix; in a purely technical sense, it's much more straightforward (though, admittedly, that's not saying much). It's the only tune on half-pint demigod produced solely from its own original version; every other track on the album has bits from several different songs flying around, but the "Memento" mix is made 100% from the "Truth" studio recordings. It's also funny that tons of different performances from "Truth" ended up in all of the other remixes, yet there was only one remix "of" this song.

Sonically, it's a pretty "normal" sounding rock band mix, at least at first glance. There are subtle little things going on - the extreme compression used on most of the individual instruments, the brutally hard edits leading into or out of certain sections - that give the track a sort of addled, unnatural aggresiveness; it's sort of like seeing the details of the music TOO clearly, to the point where it becomes oppressive. This was a deliberate angle, designed to reflect the fundamental unease and hypersensitivity of the conceptual subject matter.

There are little details throughout the track that I really enjoy - opening a "Memento" remix with lyrics about "being down to the last reel" was an irresistable prospect, as was taking the original guitar solo and having it play backwards. And the first time the lines "I thought by now it'd be really obvious where my head is at" occur in the remix (hollered, no less, and happening right before the monster drum fill which directly preceeds them in the original version) is right at the point in the track where I anticipate most "regular" Yogi fans to be scratching their heads and thinking, "What the FUCK?!"

All of this is enough chin-stroking quasi-philosophy to give even an ardent Brian Eno fan some pause, and the verdict is certainly out on how well "Truth (Memento Mix)" might work simply as a piece of music in and of itself, without Cliff's Notes-style annotations and prior familiarity with the song and movie. But all of the tracks on half-pint demigod were very deliberately designed as music specifically geared towards fans of "Any Raw Flesh?", with the intent that repeated listens to the remixes would reward familiarity with Yogi's original album. Nowhere is that sort of advance familarity paid off more than with this track, and I hope you get half as much enjoyment out of this remix as I did.

Andre LaFosse
25 November 2005