RUST (e. 109, 2023) : this tattoo of hunters’ boots and rifle bolts

Abstract

Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Rust
is a sinfonietta that channels the novel’s dense, layered materiality
and its irreverent fusion of high and low art. Rather than merely
illustrating Pynchon’s imagery, Edgerton constructs a sonic architecture
that parallels the novel’s encyclopedic scope and stylistic volatility.
The title, drawn from a passage evoking “hunters’ boots and rifle bolts
in oiled keyways,” signals a world of mechanical ritual and decaying
memory—an atmosphere that permeates the work’s five movements.

Rather than juxtaposing disparate materials, Edgerton integrates Rust with
them through a principle of concordant balance: complex textures are
not data-dull but information-rich, structured, and performatively
exacting. The result is a kind of sonic treatise on contemporary
technique, where the physicality of sound production becomes a metaphor
for the novel’s own obsession with entropy, transformation, and control.

More in time as always at o shine, than homage.

The following as if written by Thomas Pynchon…

Somewhere between the
rusted teeth of entropy and the glinting calculus of control, a
sinfonietta stirs. Five movements, five zones, five chambers of a
decaying rocket shell or a cathedral of sound, depending on your angle
of approach.

The piece begins with a
corrosive, noise-filled, broadly excursive nearly period-doubling,
pedal-bang: Movement I, metallic, industrial, a slow-breathing machine
exhaling oxidized memory. It is the inverse of its own future—Movement
V—which will end hot, explosive, thrilling, like a final ignition
sequence that knows it’s already too late.

Between these mirrored
bookends, the middle movements unfold like secret compartments in a V-2
warhead. Movement II (“Tattoo”) and Movement IV (“Rifle Bolts”) are
slow, quiet, and beautiful—yes, beautiful, but not in the way your
grandmother meant it. Beauty here is a function of pressure, of breath,
of the human body pushed to the edge of its own acoustic architecture.
Circular breathing, split tones, air noise, bow twist, valve loop—each
gesture a ritual, each sound a relic. II is elastic and transparent; IV
is deep and cold, as if watching time flow with microscope, watching
tiny tiny particles, streaming in then out.

Movement III is the pivot,
the fulcrum, the fast-twitch muscle of the form. It bursts forth in
homage to sonata archetypes, but not without irony. This is not
cookie-cutter exposition-development-recapitulation. This is a sonata
that’s been through the wars, that’s read Pynchon, that knows the
difference between parody and prayer.

And through it all: the
high and the low, the sacred and the slapstick. A treatise on extended
technique masquerading as a fever dream. A sonic Gravity’s Rainbow,
where the performers are both engineers and mystics, and the audience is
left wondering whether they’ve just witnessed a concert or a séance.

Rust doesn’t decay. It sings. <T.P.>

• author: Edgerton, Michael
• organization: Teachers (Malmö Academy of Music)
• publishing date: 2025-04-01
• type: Non-textual form
• publication status: published
• subject: Music
• publisher: BABELSCORES®
• language: English
• LU publication?: yes
• id: 9b8422b3-196b-45f8-ab95-7ba355cdad2f
• alternative location: https://www.babelscores.com/catalogs/instrumental/orchestral-music/9698-rust-this-tattoo-of-hunters-boots-and-rifle-bolts9698
• date added to LUP: 2024-07-17 21:26:21
• date last changed: 2025-09-01 17:04:20