The Front Lines of the War is a spoken word sound art album made with a resonance hum of civil conflict, poetry, and experimental sound.

Scott Ezell published these poems as a collection in August, 2019, based on his first-person experience of a Myanmar military offensive in Shan State, Myanmar. In October 2019 Ezell and Will Klingenmeier collaborated in a performance at the University of California, San Diego, that explored issues of destructive resource extraction and civil war in the China-Southeast Asia border zone. A year later, war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Artsakh, a contested region where Klingenmeier had volunteered and visited several times. Against the backdrop of this border war, and increasing authoritarianism and civil conflict worldwide, Ezell and Klingenmeier began collaborating on this sound art and spoken word version of The Front Lines of the War. This album is rooted in personal connections to contested landscapes and marginalized communities, as it explores the ways that global systems implicate us all in vectors of destruction and conflict, in which “everyone is on the front lines of the war.”

As a coda to the original collection, the album includes a section from a later poem-cycle, “Heat Maps,” based on Richard Mosse’s conceptual documentary photos of displaced persons and refugee camps.

On February 1, 2021 the Myanmar military launched a coup, jailing democratically elected leaders and sending militarized police into the streets and countryside. Air and ground offensives against civilians have continued until today, and despite international condemnation and a nationwide uprising against the coup, regional powers including China and Thailand have continued to support the Myanmar military. Tragically, hundreds of protesters, including a number of young Burmese poets dissenting against the coup, have been killed by the military. This on-going humanitarian tragedy sadly gives “The Front Lines of the War” added significance as an expression of opposition to authoritarian police state rule, in Myanmar and beyond.

The Front Lines of the War is being released as a limited edition cassette box set, as well as being available for digital streaming and download. The box set includes the 60-minute cassette, a re-release of the original chapbook “The Front Lines of the War,” as well as hand-made materials and inserts. The coda is included as a special edition, hand-printed on natural fiber paper by an indigenous women’s collective in Chiapas, Mexico, and numbered certification cards were typed on a vintage Olivetti typewriter. Protective cassette boxes have been individually processed with a unique distressing method, which parallels the element of randomness and glitching that is central to the production ethos of the album.

Databending, a form of glitch art, is a process in which a file is deliberately altered or damaged. This disruption is integral to the album in the way it signifies the fundamental disruption of human lives and natural ecosystems through war and conflict. Glitching introduces elements of randomness and improvisation which allow chance and surprise to become part of a creative process. The Front Lines of the War mirrors the increasing chance and randomness of life for marginalized peoples, and the ability to adjust and improvise which are necessary elements of resilience.

The final sound was realized entirely in Symbolic Sound’s real-time sound design language, Kyma. In two unique performances, one for each side of the album, the individual Kyma-created track structures were recombined and concatenated.

The album was mastered by Taylor Deupree at 12k in Pound Ridge, New York.