title: Support Group
instrumentation: electronic
duration: 3 1/2 minutes
written in: 2012
text: composite (see below)
Support Group will eventually be part of a piece called End, which is an opera in the form of an interview podcast. It depicts a therapy group for people who were traumatized by TV production company closing logos when they were young. Although no such groups exist in real life — as far as I know! — there is a pretty large online community devoted to closing logos. Many people really were frightened by these strange moving shapes and synth fanfares, and they’ve given them alarming nicknames like “The V of Doom” and “The S from Hell.” In fact, all the text in this piece is taken from real comments on YouTube videos with titles like “10 Scariest TV Logos of All Time.” The sound logos themselves, however, are my own inventions.
Thanks to Chris Fisher-Lochhead, Bill Milgram, Katherine Young, LJ White, Bex Finken-Hernández, Ben Hjertmann, Eliza Brown, Austin Wulliman, Elliot Cless, Nomi Epstein, and Jenna Lyle (who will also play Julie, the protagonist of End) for lending me their voice-acting skills.
For more from End, check out Julie’s Dream.
Listen
Support Group is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. This means that you can
a) share the recording, and
b) sample, remix or otherwise transform the piece, as long as you credit Alex Temple for the original work, don’t use the resulting piece commercially, and license it under the same terms.