theoretically pure anterograde amnesia

Retrograde amnesia is a form of amnesia where someone will be unable to recall events that occurred before the onset of amnesia. The term is used to categorize patterns of symptoms, rather than to indicate a particular cause or etiology. Anterograde amnesia is a form of amnesia, or memory loss, where new events are not transferred to long-term memory.

This ambitious six-compact-disc set aurally recalls seventy-two examples of anterograde amnesia, a confusing audio world where only the remnants of memories survive, left to cling on to for dear life. A very strange journey awaits, seventy-two tracks with hardly any points of reference. The real achievement here is in the way you can listen and absorb the whole release and recall very little of the experience, trying to access memories as a sufferer would when trying to recall their own memories.

There are few landmarks; the tracks have numbers not names. You can listen to them in any order, the point is to get lost. That’s easy in this ill-seen, late-Beckett landscape. You extemporize stories – they call it confabulation – to make sense of the abstract shapes in the smoke and fog.