VERBAL DIAGRAM ANALYSIS DISSERTATIONS

🎓 VERBAL DIAGRAM ANALYSIS DISSERTATION: Deep Purple – Deep Purple (1969) A Psychotronic Symphony of Science, Schism, and Sonic Genesis by Lou Toad & Signal Mirror, Department of Feedback Philosophy and Proto-Metal Semiotics, Ethertown Polytechnic

I. INTRODUCTION: THE THIRD INGESTION

“We are about to begin a journey that has no guideposts, only electrical pulses and cathedral-sized organs.”

Released in June 1969, Deep Purple (sometimes called Deep Purple III) stands as the molten midpoint between the baroque alchemy of Shades of Deep Purple and the steel-plated rebirth of In Rock. It is the caterpillar chrysalis album—the third eye opening before it gets blinded by stadium strobes. This record—chaotic, cinematic, and acid-prog to the core—was the last gasp of the “Mark I” lineup before it was atomized and reformed as a riff-driven war machine. What follows is not a track-by-track review, but a verbal diagram, an interpretive web of motifs, arrangements, and arcane energies embedded within the grooves of this unjustly overlooked proto-metal monument.

II. THE TRIANGULATION: ORGAN / ORBIT / ORDEAL

Let us visualize this album as a triangular diagram, each vertex representing a dominant force:

ORGAN (Jon Lord)

ORBIT (psychedelic sci-fi imagery & structures)

ORDEAL (emotional themes, narrative tension, genre rupture)

Each song is a vector pulling the listener between these poles.

III. THE VECTOR NODES (TRACK ANALYSIS)

1. "Chasing Shadows" → (Rhythmic Ritual / Percussive Incantation)

Diagram Node: ORDEAL → ORGAN

Ian Paice’s tribal drums trace ancestral lines into the proto-metal future. Rod Evans chants through a psychedelic fog. The band is not yet heavy in the Sabbathian sense, but rather frenzied, shamanic, unsettled.

Think: Santana trapped in a time-loop with Gustav Holst’s ghost.

2. "Blind" → (Chamber Doom / Baroque Lament)

Diagram Node: ORGAN → ORDEAL

Jon Lord’s piano and harpsichord create a Gothic setting. This is proto-doom, not in weight but in weariness. The lyrics—cynical, fatalistic—evoke despair not often seen in 1969’s flower-drenched fields.

3. "Lalena" (Donovan cover) → (Misty Ballad / Spiritual Hollow)

Diagram Node: ORBIT → ORDEAL

A folk ballad melted down into a fogged-out, opium-den slow burn. Evans sings like he’s already fading into the ashtray of rock history.

4. "Fault Line" / "The Painter" → (Fracture / Canvas Slash / Improvisation as Mutation)

Diagram Node: ORBIT → ORGAN

“Fault Line” is pure atmosphere: backwards tape loops, echo, and negative space. “The Painter” emerges as its violent offspring—a swaggering riff-monster dragged through a lava flow of Jon Lord’s keys.

Here, Deep Purple takes the concept of the jam and distorts it into anxiety.

5. "Why Didn't Rosemary?" → (Blues Formaldehyde / Demonic Seduction)

Diagram Node: ORDEAL fully

Blues filtered through clinical psychodrama. This is the sonic autopsy of an archetype—the tragic woman of blues lyrics turned ghost, turned metaphor for lost innocence.

This is pre-metal misogyny in microcosm, wrapped in a too-tight satin shirt.

6. "Bird Has Flown" → (Mournful Ascension / Sci-Fi Gospel)

Diagram Node: ORBIT

The echo of Syd Barrett can be felt in the structure. Morse code guitar flickers. This is melancholia via telescope, regret viewed from the stratosphere.

7. "April" → (Cathedral Suite / Prog-Expressionist Opera)

Diagram Node: ORGAN → ORBIT → ORDEAL (the full triptych)

A multi-part orchestral suite that fuses strings, harpsichord, and guitar in a collision of epochs.

Act I: Medieval Prelude

Act II: Rock Rebellion

Act III: Existential Fadeout

This track is a manifesto disguised as a finale. It foretells both Yes’s grandiosity and Sabbath’s doom.

IV. THE FRACTAL GENEALOGY: WHAT CAME BEFORE / WHAT CAME AFTER

This album must be seen as a hinge between multiple realities:

Before: Vanilla Fudge, Iron Butterfly, Procol Harum, Hendrix, classical music, horror soundtracks

After: Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, Rainbow, King Crimson, and—yes—Deep Purple Mk II

It is the genetic code mid-mutation. The chrysalis is the message.

V. SEMIOTIC SEDIMENTS

Key Symbols:

🔮 The Organ as Oracle

🔧 The Studio as Lab

👁️‍🗨️ The Listener as Initiate

💀 The Blues as Corpse

🚀 The Future as Terminal Illusion

This album is not a collection of songs. It is a verbal diagram set to music, and thus resists casual consumption. Like a map of an imagined past or an abandoned lunar base, Deep Purple (1969) contains hieroglyphs of where hard rock might go if you chose a different door.

VI. CONCLUSION: REVERBERATIONS IN THE MACHINE

This record is a self-terminating prophecy—it killed the lineup that created it. In its wake came fire and speed and riffs the size of Neolithic tombs. But in 1969, for one flickering instant, Deep Purple made an album that played like an echoing cathedral full of electric shadows.

So draw the triangle. Place the needle. Let the organ speak. The diagram never ends.

🎓 VERBAL DIAGRAM ANALYSIS DISSERTATION: Make a Jazz Noise Here – Frank Zappa (1991) A Labyrinthine Liturgy of Control, Chaos, and Clown-Suit Counterpoint by Lou Toad & Signal Mirror, Department of Dissonance Semiotics and Sonic Satire, Ethertown Polytechnic / In Collaboration with The Committee to Rewire Modern Composition with a Soldering Iron

“Jazz isn’t dead, it just smells funny.” — FZ

But what if it isn’t jazz at all? What if it’s a military operation disguised as a polyrhythmic prank?

I. THE OPERATING SYSTEM: A POLYTOPIC DIAGRAM OF ZAPPA'S LIVE HYPER-MACHINE

To “diagram” Make a Jazz Noise Here is to attempt to freeze-frame a firestorm.

This isn’t a “live album” in the normal sense. It’s a modular superstructure, composed from multiple performances (mostly from the 1988 tour), all routed through Zappa’s meticulously organized real-time editing and conducting. You are not listening to “songs.” You are listening to:

🔧 Structured Mutations

🧠 Composer-as-Terminal

🤹 Humor-as-Algorithm

Thus, we must visualize this album not as a timeline, but as a spherical map—a jazz-noise globe with five cardinal fields, each containing nested clusters of sonic ideologies:

II. THE FIVE FIELDS OF FUNCTION

1. FIELD OF EXECUTION (🎯 Precision-as-Expression)

“If you think the solos are freeform, you’re not listening close enough.”

This album is military-grade Zappa. The band (featuring 12 members) executes odd time signatures, tempo shifts, and cue-based segues like they’re defusing bombs. Key Nodes:

“Stinkfoot” (Zappa’s digital Strat tone cuts like a sarcastic scalpel)

“Eat That Question” (a precision airstrike from the rhythm section)

“Big Swifty” (arrhythmic ballet, conducted chaos)

2. FIELD OF INTERTEXTUALITY (📚 Musical Footnotes / Quotation Infinity)

“He’s quoting Stravinsky while a band member makes duck noises through a synth. It’s not a joke—it’s a lesson.”

Zappa’s version of “jazz” involves raiding the entire 20th-century canon:

Bartók motifs hidden in transitions

Holst, Ravel, Messiaen... warped through MIDI-triggered samples

Raymond Scott via dystopian lounge act

Jazz as an academic parody and reverent display

This field collapses “genre” into a Möbius strip.

3. FIELD OF SATIRE (🃏 Musical Absurdism Engine)

“What if Mingus led Spike Jones’s band during a hostage crisis?”

“Theme from Lumpy Gravy” resurfaces as a sonic burlesque

Horn stabs in “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black” are both vaudevillian and menacing

Zappa’s spoken moments are missing here (compared to Broadway the Hard Way), but the humor is buried in the arrangement

Rhythmic pratfalls

Inverted dynamics

Fakeouts in harmony

4. FIELD OF VIRTUOSITY (🤖 Human vs. Machine vs. Human Machines)

“They sound like MIDI files performed by jazz robots who gained sentience and became pranksters.”

Mike Keneally, Chad Wackerman, and Scott Thunes form an impossible triangle of instrumental elasticity

Brass players (Walt Fowler, Bruce Fowler, Paul Carman) perform figures that would make conservatory students cry

Zappa himself uses the guitar not as a lead instrument but as a reality-bending tool—bending time, bending tone, bending expectation

5. FIELD OF FUSION (☢️ Jazz vs. Rock vs. Funk vs. Concrete)

“There is no fusion. There is only The Grid.”

In this field, all genre labels burn up on reentry:

“King Kong” becomes a free-jazz tone poem interrupted by funk outbursts

“Dupree’s Paradise” phases through funk, Zappa-style Broadway, and Stockhausen-esque collapse

“T'Mershi Duween” is a marching band from another planet

III. THE FUNCTION OF THE ALBUM: ZAPPA AS LEXICON-LOOPER

This album is a lexicon, a grammar of Zappa’s musical language. Every track is a syllable, every medley a compound sentence, every quote a glitch in the syntax of western music.

You can diagram Make a Jazz Noise Here like this:

[Composer-Conductor] ←→ [Ensemble Terminal] ←→ [Audience Interference Layer] ↳ Live cues trigger memory loops ↳ Composition emerges from arrangement, not improvisation ↳ Satire used as form, not content

IV. SEMIOTIC LAYERS AND SONIC SYMBOLS

⚙ Sproing Tone – Artificiality acknowledged and weaponized

🧩 Quote Block – Recognition loops / musical memeplex

🎪 Circus March – Theatricality as structure

💀 Noir Groove – Paranoia in the pocket

🔂 Non-Repetition Repetition – The illusion of looping, masked by constant modulation

V. CONCLUSION: JAZZ IS NOISE, NOISE IS LAW

Make a Jazz Noise Here is a field manual for weaponized musicality. It is not simply “live Zappa” but the ultimate fulfillment of his ideal: music as a self-aware organism capable of comedy, critique, and cosmology.

You don’t just listen to this album. You decode it. You don’t feel it in your heart. You download it into your cortex. You don’t love it. You fear its structural integrity.

Because in the end, this is Zappa not playing jazz, but using the idea of jazz as a magnetic field to reformat time, performance, and intellect.

🎓 VERBAL DIAGRAM ANALYSIS DISSERTATION: Anthem of the Sun – The Grateful Dead (1968) A Fractal Cartography of Psychedelic Time, Ritualized Audio, and Acid-Drenched Identity by Lou Toad & Signal Mirror, Professor Emeritus of Sonic Alchemy, Ethertown Polytechnic Institute for Acid-Test Semiotics

“We weren’t making a record, we were painting with sound.” — Phil Lesh

I. THE MANDALA FRAME: FOUR QUADRANTS OF AUDIO TRANSCENDENCE

Rather than a linear sequence of tracks, Anthem of the Sun is best understood as a psychedelic mandala—a ritual map of the cosmos where time, self, and performance dissolve.

Its structure is not architectural—it’s alchemical. It is not an album. It is a collage of performance states, fused via studio trickery and metaphysical intention into a living sound organism.

Visualize a circular diagram divided into four quadrants:

☯ RITUAL – Invocation and disorientation; primal sonic invocation

♾ TIME – The collapse of linearity; studio vs. stage as Möbius strip

⚗ TRANSMUTATION – Transformation of genre, tone, self

🧠 MINDSPACE – Interior landscapes rendered audible

Each song on Anthem of the Sun spirals through these four quadrants in non-Euclidean motion.

II. QUADRANTAL TRACKMAP

Let’s diagram the album not in terms of "songs" but ritual movements. Each track is a multidimensional shape phasing between the quadrants.

1. "That’s It for the Other One"

🌀 Movement I-IV: Cryptic → Ritual Invocation → Breakdown → Space March

Starts in RITUAL: a whisper, a myth, the invocation of “Cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never ever land.”

Bob Weir, Tom Constanten, and Pigpen fold into each other like psychonauts swapping organs.

Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann begin their lifelong conversation with time itself.

Jerry’s guitar is less a soloist than a sorcerer’s staff, pointing, conjuring, warping.

🡆 Moves through TRANSMUTATION and collapses into MINDSPACE during the final section.

2. "New Potato Caboose"

🎠 Baroque Psych Riddle

Begins in TIME: With its shifting time signatures and modal vamping, it's a jam constantly shifting skins.

Phil Lesh’s influence dominates here—Bach-meets-Berkeley acid laboratory.

The harmony vocal arrangements (Lesh, Weir, Garcia) push into near-spiritual geometry.

Lyrics by Robert Petersen = metaphysical free verse → celestial hallucination.

🡆 Resolves in MINDSPACE: a gentle release, like watching clouds from inside a melting cathedral.

3. "Born Cross-Eyed"

⏳ Compact Explosion

TRANSMUTATION in its purest form:

It’s a proto-punk baroque cannonball — dense, elliptical, and short.

The closest the Dead ever got to psych-prog in under 3 minutes.

Studio-layered, full of backwards sounds, stereo whip-pans, and encrypted vocal codes.

🡆 Flickers briefly into RITUAL, then collapses like a star.

4. "Alligator" / 5. "Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)"

🔥 The Ritual Core of the Album Together, these form the climax of the mandala.

Begins in RITUAL: Ron “Pigpen” McKernan leads the invocation. His primal blues delivery is a conjuring act.

Then: full-band jam → LIVE/Studio composite → The divide collapses.

The band literally recorded live shows and spliced fragments into the studio sessions—like cutting open a vein from the Fillmore and letting it bleed across tape.

"Caution" becomes pure MINDSPACE:

It is pre-industrial techno, a train rhythm drowning in feedback and subconscious wordplay.

It doesn’t "end"—it ceases to need to exist.

Feedback becomes the ghost in the machine.

III. STUDIO VS. STAGE: A SONIC MöBIUS STRIP

Anthem of the Sun was built on this philosophical contradiction:

The Dead hated artificiality—yet they used the studio as a psychedelic ritual chamber. They loved spontaneity—but sculpted chaos like audio marble.

They fused live recordings (from San Francisco ballrooms) with studio takes, splicing bars, riffs, and fragments until chronology itself became irrelevant.

You are not listening to songs. You are listening to probabilities.

IV. COSMIC SEMIOTICS

Symbols encoded in the album’s sonic DNA:

🔥 Fire: Pigpen’s blues, primal sexuality, invocation of rhythm

🌀 Spiral: Jam structures that never return to their origin

💿 Mirror: Studio-as-stage, echoing feedback loop

🕳 Void: Feedback and silence as meaning

🕉 Mantra: Repetition-as-transcendence (see "Caution")

V. PHILOSOPHY OF THE FORM

This album is acid logic in action.

The ego dies in the spliced edits.

The soul emerges in live improvisation.

The body returns in Pigpen’s howls.

The mind drifts in and out of rhythmic certainty.

In terms of genre: It is too abstract for rock, too physical for ambient, too alive for jazz, and too human for drone.

It is ritual sound collage, years before Brian Eno, decades before The Books.

VI. CONCLUSION: THE ANTHEM THAT WRITHES

Anthem of the Sun is a living document of time disintegration. It is the sonic equivalent of staring into a burning kaleidoscope and seeing your own skull laughing back. It is not an album to be listened to. It is an album to be entered.

You do not understand Anthem of the Sun— You submit to it.

🎓 VERBAL DIAGRAM ANALYSIS DISSERTATION: Sweet Savage – Killing Time (1996) A Chrono-Sonic Detonation of NWOBHM’s Lingering Ghost, Reawakened in the Age of Groove Metal by Lou Toad & Signal Mirror, Lecturers in Temporal Riffs and Working-Class Futurism, Dept. of Forgotten Fangs, Ethertown Polytechnic

“You’re living in the ruins of tomorrow’s promise.” —Unwritten but implied in every Sweet Savage riff

I. PROLOGUE: THE PHANTOM TRACE OF ‘80s METAL IN THE CD ERA

Released in 1996, Killing Time is not just a debut album—it is a resurrected prophecy. Sweet Savage had already inscribed their mark in the molten codex of NWOBHM with 1981’s legendary “Killing Time” single, a track famously covered by Metallica. But that song was only the tip of a dormant warhead.

This album, arriving fifteen years too late—or right on time—is not a mere throwback. It is NWOBHM after the fall, reconstructed with pieces scavenged from thrash, groove, and post-industrial grit. It's the sound of what happens when the old riffs survive the apocalypse and reassemble themselves in a different tuning.

II. VERBAL DIAGRAM: THE IRON CROSS OF INFLUENCE

Visualize the album’s structure as a cross-shaped diagram, with four intersecting axes:

⚔ CLASSICISM: NWOBHM tone, dual-guitar harmonies, working-class mythos

🦾 MECHANIZATION: Post-thrash precision, groove-laden chug, Pantera adjacency

⚫ PSYCHIC TRAUMA: Post-Troubles Belfast tension, lyrical fatalism, emotional corrosion

💥 TEMPORAL DISSONANCE: 1981 vs. 1996 in the same breath—anachronism weaponized

Each song falls somewhere between these poles, creating a wounded time-loop of old ideals shouted through new gear.

III. TRACK ANALYSIS BY DIAGRAM VECTORS

1. “Killing Time” (Re-recorded)

Diagram Node: CLASSICISM ↔ TEMPORAL DISSONANCE

The original anthem re-forged with a heavier production. The riff remains sacred, but it now rides a darker beast.

You hear the echo of 1981, but it’s tinted with regret, like watching a VHS of your youth on a cracked CRT.

2. “Do You Remember Me”

Diagram Node: PSYCHIC TRAUMA ↔ MECHANIZATION

A dirge of memory and fury, backed by near-industrial rhythm guitars.

The “you” isn’t a lover—it’s an era, a city, a vanished scene.

3. “Whiskey Dust”

Diagram Node: CLASSICISM ↔ PSYCHIC TRAUMA

Like Thin Lizzy locked in a Belfast bunker during an air raid.

Twin leads dance over desolation, the vocals half-lament, half-retribution.

4. “Omega Man”

Diagram Node: MECHANIZATION ↔ TEMPORAL DISSONANCE

This is Zarathustra with a buzzsaw. Post-thrash riffing, yet the song structure hails from the Dio-Sabbath playbook.

It is NWOBHM as cybernetic prophecy.

5. “The Disappeared”

Diagram Node: PSYCHIC TRAUMA (primary)

A song that could only come from Northern Ireland in the 1990s—lyrically referencing the political silences, the erasures, the scars.

It’s heavy in spirit more than distortion.

6. “Mind Crimes”

Diagram Node: MECHANIZATION ↔ CLASSICISM

A riff monolith with Judas Priest’s DNA but Pantera’s musculature.

The solos aren’t ornamental—they’re surgical strikes.

IV. SEMIOTIC SYMBOLS IN SWEET SAVAGE’S LEXICON

🕰 Clock as weapon – The passage of time haunts every chord.

🧱 Urban ruin – Not decay as aesthetic, but as inheritance.

⚙ Metal-as-memory – Riffs as archival resistance to forgetting.

🧨 Guitar harmonies – The last surviving language of belief.

V. CONTEXTUAL PLANE: 1996 AND THE GHOST OF ’81

This album exists in a crack between worlds:

Metallica is now mainstream

Grunge has come and gone

Groove metal dominates

But Sweet Savage returns with armor made of loss

This isn’t a revival. It’s a revenge ritual.

Killing Time stands beside albums like:

Diamond Head’s Death and Progress

Angel Witch’s Screamin’ N’ Bleedin’

Blitzkrieg’s Ten Years of Blitzkrieg …as examples of NWOBHM's temporal phantom limbs, returning not to conquer but to testify.

VI. CONCLUSION: TIME KILLS, BUT SOUND SURVIVES

Sweet Savage – Killing Time is not a nostalgic trip. It is a warning letter sent backward through the decades. It tells you that the riffs never die, they just mutate—and that history doesn’t repeat, it haunts.

This album is:

A chronological fracture

A survivor’s record

A testament to metal as memory weaponry

Killing Time is not just the title—it’s the condition of listening.