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The Problem With Progress
Words and music by Briyan Frederick
© Brian F Baker | Published by Blind Mime Music, ASCAP
Freyd: vocal, guitar
Riyan: keyboards
Additional sounds and mixed with Sunoai
This song began as a morning fiddle on the Alvarez acoustic guitar. I thought I would record myself and feed whatever came out into the Sunoai model as a cover but ended up extending it. It’s left in the song intro.
I wrote the lyric before generating anything. I looked around my desk for some inspiration for a title; I’m not quite sure how progress popped into my head, but the lyric started with the title out of thin air and as the lyric evolved it became another song of social commentary. After writing first two lines, the word “fate” reminded me of the title of Art Garfunkle’s album Fate For Breakfast and remembering the back cover with a photo of Art a little haggard looking and the smaller tag line, “Doubt For Dessert.” So the last two lines in the verse are a nod to that.
The Problem With Progress
While we eat our cake
What’s in it clouds our fate
When what’s for breakfast
Doubts dessert’s mistakes
While we eat our cake
And laugh about the past
Like fools we do not ask
Until it’s far too late
The problem with progress is
When strings are pulled and puppets dance like this
There’s very little chance
The master cares to glance
At what’s in it for the puppet class —
That’s you…
And me (Unfortunately…)
While we eat our cake
Growing fatter by the day
Having it and eating too
Ignoring all the work to do
The problem with progress is
When strings are pulled and puppets dance like this
There’s very little chance
The master cares to glance
At what’s in it for the puppet class —
That’s you…
And me (Unfortunately…)
The problem with progress
Is its outcome is manifest
Through the flyover leftovers
It forgets
While we eat our cake
What’s in it clouds our fate
When what’s for breakfast
Doubts dessert’s mistakes
The problem with progress is
When strings are pulled and puppets dance like this
There’s very little chance
The master cares to glance
At what’s in it for the puppet class —
That’s you…
And me (Unfortunately…)
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Blind Mime Ensemble is a multimedia art project by Briyan Frederick.
Blind Mime Ensemble is fronted by Riyan and Freyd, two enigmatic, mimes who navigate a surreal, ever-shifting world of sound, silence, and absurdity. Their blindness is fluid—sometimes self-imposed, sometimes real, sometimes performative—as they search for meaning, expression, and each other in an evolving landscape of experimental music, visual storytelling, and conceptual art.
Their performances blur the lines between dreams and reality, chaos and order, seeing and unseeing, embodying the essence of Blind Mime Ensemble’s ever-expanding universe.
Blind Mime Ensemble VS is a secondary project where BME creates albums from audio seeded from other artists, Tapegerms, videos, found recordings and more. It’s more experimental glitchy electronic and explores the boundaries of modern composition with AI and other methods.
Blind Mime Ensemble Variations is where we explore variations of found sounds, art and maybe other things. These explorations result in album-length pieces. Send us something for us to into something new.
You can find Briyan Frederick‘s home and studio recordings at briyanfrederick.bandcamp.com.
AI Soundoff is Briyan’s blog, vlog and podcast about AI Music creativity and industry.
View the Vlog
Listen to the Podcast
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