2023 repress Daytime Viewing (1979-80) is an extended narrative song, based on a casual analysis of daytime television drama and the audience phenomena such programming addresses. The piece explores the use of fantasy as a survival mechanism against loneliness, illustrating the human compulsion to inflate the mundane to mythological proportions. A central female character weaves tales, using threads of personal experience and the idea of TV as friend, as mantra, and as transformational window between imagined spectacle and the pedestrian plane.
Originally released as a private cassette edition [recorded, 1982; Chez Hum-Boom release, 1983] documenting the collaborative performance piece of the same name by Jacqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom. This heady, thoroughly enjoyable work was first made available on CD and LP in 2013 by Unseen Worlds. Jacqueline Humbert (aka J. Jasmine) is a songwriter of brains and wit on par with Robert Ashley, with whom she's worked extensively. David Rosenboom's complex, harmonic electronic arrangements are accentuated brilliantly by percussion from William Winant. Daytime Viewing can happily be added to a small but significant group of work that, through lesser-known paths, engaged in an equally revelatory reexamination of the Great American Songbook as Minimalism did with 20th Century composition.
Text and lyrics by Jacqueline Humbert.
Music by David Rosenboom and Jacqueline Humbert.
Music arrangements, recording, and performances by David Rosenboom.
Vocals by Jacqueline Humbert.
All the music was realized with Touché, computer-assisted keyboard instrument from Buchla & Associates—(designed collaboratively by Donald Buchla and David Rosenboom)—and Dr. Rhythm electronic percussion.
This project was originally recorded in 1982 in analog form at the Center for Contemporary Music Recording Studio at Mills College, Oakland, CA and released as a private cassette in 1983. First re-released in 2013 by Unseen Worlds (UW10), it was re-mastered again in 2021 by Stephan Mathieu.