*100 copies limited edition* Reading Group, in collaboration with Braddock, PA-based imprint Huner Francis, is pleased to present "Spatial Data Management (Original Score)" by Ulla E. Straus and John Andrew Wilhite, a beautiful score to an equally beautiful film by Philadelphia-based artist Greyory Blake. The score to Spatial Data Management (2021) is a contemplative and referential ambient work. It provides the backdrop for the essay film’s exploration of how stolen value and the contemporary predicaments of AI technologies mirror problems wrestled with by Baroque thinkers. 

Wilhite began the compositional process by compiling a series of excerpts from old tapes and sessions with accordionist Kalle Moberg. He blended their muffled recordings of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Sabat Mater (1736), a devotion to Mary in medieval Latin, with droning soundscapes of birds, bees, and sirens, and didn’t whittle away atmospherics. François Couperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses (1717) for harpsichord wax and wane between organ and synthesizer as alternating translations of analog to digital. The movement calls to mind the film’s themes of how contemporary technologies change our relationship to what we think is natural, what we refer to as the source. Straus then mixed the fragments Wilhite assembled, focusing them through what might be described as acts of musical grace, knowing without stealing.