WATIV XX: Twenty Years of Silence

A combat veteran’s sonic reckoning, twenty years after Iraq

Available August 15th

Release Info

Artist: William A. Thompson IV (WATIV)
Format: Cassette + Digital
Label: High Mayhem Records
Release Date: August 15, 2025
Genre: Experimental, Electroacoustic, Sonic Documentary
RIYL: William Basinski, Matmos, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, war and postwar sound art
 

Project Summary

WATIV XX: Twenty Years of Silence is a sonic confrontation with memory and war, a 20-year audio reflection by William A. Thompson IV, a former U.S. Army counterintelligence agent deployed to Iraq in 2005.

Side A, composed in 2025, explores how memory lingers not as a narrative but as signal, texture, and ghost. These new compositions are built from transcribed speech, including fragments of Southern preacher sermons and poems by Robert Frost and Walt Whitman that mourn or memorialize fallen soldiers. These texts are never directly spoken; instead, they are algorithmically transformed into music using symbolic and spectral transcription methods, including command-line tools like WAON. The resulting works are performed on the Infastain Piano, an augmented acoustic instrument designed by the artist using tactile transducers mounted to the soundboard.

Side B presents a remastered archival edition of Baghdad Music Journal, the original wartime album recorded on deployment. Built from field recordings, captured Iraqi radio, and early speech-to-music experiments, it was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and profiled in Leonardo Music Journal. The work has since been cited in Sound Targets by Jonathan Pieslak (Indiana University Press), a major study of soldiers and music in the Iraq War.

Together, the two sides form a sonic palimpsest, a magnetic tape conversation across decades and states of mind, from battlefield immediacy to long-distance aftermath.