Catalogue Entry: Violent Times
Archival notes on St. Vincent’s “Violent Times” track
Title: Violent Times
Artist: St. Vincent (Annie Clark)
Date: 2024
Medium: Audio recording (digital)
Duration: 4:10 (approx.)
Genre/Form: Contemporary popular music; cinematic pop
Provenance: Commercial release, early 21st-century United States
Collection: Archive of Transmissions (provisional)
Description:
Violent Times is a recorded audio work that documents shifts in perception under conditions of social acceleration, material pressure, and psychological saturation. Structured with an initial sense of clarity that gradually destabilises, the piece employs polished production as an entry point before introducing distortion and disorientation. This formal progression mirrors historical patterns in which systems designed for coherence fracture under sustained stress.
Lyrical references to wealth, spectacle, and motion function less as narrative elements than as cultural indicators—artefacts of a value system in erosion. The work records how meaning thins when accumulation replaces orientation, and how vision itself recalibrates in response.
Interpretive Context:
Central to the piece is a stated alteration of sight rather than environment. The world remains materially consistent, but the observer’s interpretive frame shifts. This aligns the work with broader historical and archaeological records in which trauma, upheaval, or prolonged instability produce changes not in structure but in perception.
Imagery of descent, burial, and immersion evokes stratigraphic depth. These references suggest that clarity is sometimes recovered below surfaces rather than above them, positioning the work within a lineage of cultural objects concerned with excavation rather than transcendence.
Significance:
Rather than offering resolution, Violent Times preserves tension between control and collapse, connection and erosion. Its restraint and legibility mark it as a durable cultural artefact—one that documents how individuals and societies adapt their gaze during periods of prolonged stress.
Condition:
Digital master; no visible degradation at time of cataloguing.
Notes:
This work is best understood not as commentary but as record: an auditory document of altered perception during a period of cultural compression.
