Setting aside the contents – and comprehensibility – of his speeches, there is something undeniably fascinating about Donald Trump’s speech patterns. His sprawling self-described ‘weave’ moves with an avant-garde unpredictability; erratically changing pace, returning to and elaborating on repeated themes, often trailing off and leaving cadences unresolved.
Evidently, it's not only us who thinks this. With his new release, His Mother Was a Woman, Berlin-based British musician Martin Gordon has turned Trump’s speech patterns into a full album of musical compositions.
According to Gordon’s label, Radiant Future, “the album demonstrates Gordon's pioneering compositional method that transforms the unpredictable speech patterns of US President Donald Trump into complex musical structures that break free from traditional 4/4 time signatures.”
The album’s creation, apparently, took inspiration from the medieval alchemical process of chrysopeia – artificially turning base materials into gold. Its creation involved analysing Trump’s speeches and public statements in order to turn the linguistic patterns – what Gordon describes as an "erratic semantic output" – into musical compositions.
This isn’t the first time that Gordon, who started his career as a bassist for Sparks before founding the ‘70s groups Jet and Radio Stars, has used Trump as a muse. His 2021 release set Trump’s notorious phone call with Georgia governor Brad Raffensperger to music, a section of which you can hear in the YouTube clip below.
“My last two or three albums have been driven by that lunatic,” Gordon told Guitar World at the time. “When he disappeared, I was kind of a loose end, like ‘What the fuck am I gonna do now?’ but then I stumbled across a transcript of his infamous speech from November 2020, which was his attempt to derail the US democratic process.”
Evidently, Gordon doesn’t treat the process of turning speech patterns into musical rhythms as a lightweight novelty. Earlier this year, he presented a paper at Dundee’s Abertay University on the subject, titled Trapped in the Metric Tar Pit of Common Time.
His Mother Was A Woman is released 17 September via Radiant Future.
