Have Mercy On Me is a generative EP by Palace Lido.

A recorded song is fixed. It has a length, a sequence and an ending, and it plays back the same each time. Memory doesn’t work that way. What stays is never the recording itself, only a version of it.

These four tracks are built the way memory holds a song. Each song has been taken apart into its elements, a drone, an arpeggio, a voice, a field recording, then code reassembles them each time they play. Nothing is random and nothing is improvised. The foundation stays. Like a copy, familiar but never identical.

The listener decides how long a track lasts, from one minute to thirty. Elements marked * are generative and the graph traces them as they move. No play is definitive. What remains is the spectrogram. Each play prints its own, a record of that one version, to keep or discard. The site is the printer, and every listen is a single print.

The work is still evolving.

Music by Graeme Swinton.
Eterna lyric and vocal by Mike Seed.
Samples and telephone calls by Dominic Jones.