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Editor’s note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Thursday, October 23rd.<\/p>\n Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.<\/p>\n Good morning. I\u2019m Lindsay Mast.<\/p>\n MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I\u2019m Myrna Brown.<\/p>\n Coming next on The World and Everything in It<\/em>: a conversation with the creator of the new album, XX: Twenty Years of Silence<\/em>.<\/p>\n In 2004, William A. Thompson IV was an Army National Guardsman in Iraq, charged with gathering intelligence. He was also a jazz pianist with an experimental bent. His debut album, Baghdad Music Journal<\/em>, was released by the High Mayhem label while he was still overseas. Now, 20 years later, Thompson has released a kind of sequel. WORLD\u2019s Music Reviewer Arsenio Orteza talked to him about it. ARSENIO ORTEZA: If you condense the name \u201cWilliam A. Thompson IV\u201d into initials and add the Roman numeral for \u201cfour,\u201d you get the word \u201cWATIV.\u201d That\u2019s one of the names under which William A. Thompson IV has been releasing music for the last 20 years. He first used it on Baghdad Music Journal<\/em>. The album was exactly what its title said\u2014an aural document of an Iraq-war soldier\u2019s experience. While its experimental, electronic nature might have normally made it \u201cniche,\u201d the uniqueness of its origin and purpose got it some rather high-profile attention.<\/p>\n HOWARD MANDEL: \u201cKind of freaky\u201d is the way many people might describe Thompson\u2019s music.<\/em><\/p>\n That\u2019s National Public Radio\u2019s Howard Mandel describing Baghdad Music Journal<\/em> on a 2005 episode of NPR\u2019s All Things Considered<\/em>.<\/p>\n MANDEL: He uses static as a rhythm instrument and incorporates eerie ambiences like the whirring of an air conditioner, overheard conversation, or random bits of short-wave radio that he records on his iPod. He says he adapted quickly to this new technology. But Thompson is less about the medium than about the moods he tries to capture\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n Mandel\u2019s description was accurate.<\/p>\n William Thompson\u2019s latest release, XX: Twenty Years of Silence<\/em>, has no air conditioners or short-wave radio, but it does incorporate eerie ambiences and human speech. Consider, for instance, the opening cut, \u201cSpeaking in Tongues.\u201d It\u2019s based on the melodic suggestions of a recording of a preacher discussing threats facing the family.<\/p>\n MUSIC: [Speaking in Tongues]<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s one of several speech-to-music experiments on the album. Thompson earned a Ph.D. in experimental music in 2022. So I asked him what sparked his interest in what he calls the \u201cmusicality of speech.\u201d<\/p>\n THOMPSON: It\u2019s really interesting, I think, because the way people speak is pretty musical and\u2014to the point that you can look at populations regionally and\u2014and their dialects and then compare it to their folk musics, and it\u2019s very similar. You know, like the first track on this record, \u201cSpeaking in Tongues,\u201d it\u2019s some Southern gospel preacher, and it\u2019s very blues sounding to me, and it sounds like church music of that caliber. I like the idea of composing from something that just\u2014sounds that aren\u2019t necessarily music, because I don\u2019t really necessarily distinguish between music and noise the way that I think a lot of people do.<\/em><\/p>\n One of the other speech-to-music pieces on Twenty Years of Silence<\/em> leans into Thompson\u2019s wartime experiences. It\u2019s called \u201cDirge for Two Veterans,\u201d and it\u2019s based directly on the last two stanzas of Walt Whitman\u2019s nine-stanza poem of the same name.<\/p>\n MUSIC: [Dirge for Two Veterans]<\/em><\/p>\n As with \u201cSpeaking in Tongues,\u201d a recitation establishes the melody, which Thompson then develops on piano. He then reintroduces the recitation in increasingly degraded forms, transforming it into a kind of decaying memory. Another piece, \u201cNot to Keep,\u201d takes its title from a poem by Robert Frost and also utilizes recitation. In this case, however, the speaking is all but buried by a piano, a bass, and a drum kit that seem to be in a slow but gradually intensifying struggle. The poem\u2019s last line emerges clearly only at the end. Thompson said that the poem itself was \u201ca little too on the nose about war and veterans\u201d and that he didn\u2019t want the piece to feel \u201ccorny.\u201d<\/p>\n Not being too on the nose isn\u2019t something that Thompson is likely to be accused of any time soon. Thompson includes detailed track-by-track explanations of his process with each selection, but even listeners who read the notes for Twenty Years of Silence <\/em>may find that the pieces reveal themselves only after multiple listens.<\/p>\n One group of listeners who might have an edge are fans of classical music. The genre tags on Twenty Years of Silence<\/em>\u2019s Bandcamp page are \u201cexperimental,\u201d \u201csound collage,\u201d \u201celectronic,\u201d \u201cjazz,\u201d \u201cwar music,\u201d and \u201cNew Orleans.\u201d But I detected a classical echo at the beginning of the song called \u201cComputer Riot.\u201d<\/p>\n MUSIC: [Computer Riot]<\/em><\/p>\n Thompson, who in addition to jazz, is also conversant with the high-culture canon, confirmed my suspicions.<\/p>\n THOMPSON: I like that you\u2019re saying that because I\u2019ve\u2014I\u2019ve always really liked classical music, especially modern classical music. And I think my writing is definitely informed by that, and my improvisation. I mean, because I minored in composition, so I was writing\u2014just writing music for\u2014modern music for composition lessons, yeah, the entire time. So that also influenced it. But even, you know, with Baghdad Music Journal, I was listening to a lot of, like, Bach. I think I can hear Bach, you know, like a fake, like, kind of jazz version of Bach happening.<\/em><\/p>\n None of which is to overshadow Thompson\u2019s real jazz. On this album, the loveliest real example is \u201c122-60,\u201d a song based on the first time that Thompson met his wife.<\/p>\n MUSIC<\/em>: [122-60]<\/em><\/p>\n To quote the album\u2019s liner notes, \u201c122-60\u201d \u201cexpresses the joy that [his wife] brought into [Thompson\u2019s] life.\u201d What the liner notes leave out is that the song can bring joy into the lives of Thompson\u2019s listeners as well.<\/p>\n I\u2019m Arsenio Orteza. WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source wng.org \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Editor’s note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above. LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Thursday, October 23rd. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I\u2019m Lindsay Mast. 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