Bob Hope No Hope

tv is my friend

and it has been

with me everyday from an early age

- Colleen Green

Bob Hope No Hope was produced by Jenn Stanley with editorial support from Michelle Macklem. It also uses an excerpt of a Fresh Air interview in which Terry Gross talks to author Richard Zoglin about Bob Hope’s legacy.

Jenn Stanley writes:

I'm approaching this anthropologically from the perspective of an otherworldly consciousness, picking up signals from the earth during the brief period in which humans have utilized radio waves for communication. “bob hope no hope” examines how seemingly ephemeral entertainment can collect, rot, and subsequently poison otherwise creative, fertile ground.

It is part meditation to process my own apocalyptic anxiety, which has me convinced we’re at the precipice of either self-destruction or self-realization. I aspire toward the latter, but for this sonic journey, I ask the listener to consider what sirens call us to engineer our own demise. The alien anthropologist is tasked with piecing together how it only took about 100 years of advanced technology and mass communication for humans to self-destruct. What happened?

I’m interested in how advanced recording and mass communication technology have warped time and increased chaos. bob hope no hope is a reprocessing, a letting go, a prayer for peace, an exorcism. Its subjects are relics of another point in space-time, yet their effects are still felt. The ghosts linger.

The ordered noise of bob hope no hope is built around compositions for guitar based on prime number time signatures where 1 beat is 1 second (human earth time). Inspired by Carl Sagan’s “Contact,” I imagine an extraterrestrial consciousness communicating in prime numbers, and the odd time signatures and dissonant notes are an abstract representation of their data processing.