Survival Unit III - Game Theory (2013)

Survival Unit III: Joe McPhee, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Michael Zerang

Tracklist & Liner Notes:

1. Ever Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head
“You shouldn’t eat something bigger than your head in one go. Snakes can do it but you can’t, so don’t try.” (With all due respect to B. Kliban)

2. Love in The Time Of Aids
This title was borrowed from Garcia Marquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera, in which “lovesickness is a disease considered comparable to cholera.” In today’s popular culture, love is often a throw away, an obsession in song and in life, equated with or confused with sex, power and control. More than 30 years into an extraordinary global health crisis, what is this thing called love? What are the consequences and what does the future hold. Just asking.

3. Zero-Sum Game
“In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which a participant’s gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participant(s).”

4. A Song For Beggars
This song won’t feed the starving, nor will conferences on hunger, with a fortune spent on TALKING. Nor will it house the homeless or quench the thirst of millions who will die from lack of water, while Vampires drink THEIR blood.
This song won’t stop our fighting over bullshit and the finite, nor keep us all from freezing when the sun burns through the sky. Nor will it save our asses from a fate too cruel to mention, when from our greed and madness, we have sucked the planet dry.
But the weak the Earth inherits; and the sick and disillusioned and the wounded and the shattered and the hopeless without vision and the lost without direction, helpless, lonely and the sad!
They will kill the clean young soldiers, douse the spark of bright tomorrows, end forever dreams of glory, lay to rest the brutal lies. They will satiate their hunger on the bodies of the tourists. They will satisfy their thirsting on the liquor of those lives.

Personnel:

Joe McPhee - alto sax, pocket trumpet
Fred Lonberg-Holm - cello, electronics
Michael Zerang - percussion