The late‑2000s were dominated by the global financial crisis, which produced a pervasive sense of uncertainty and a collective yearning for “repair.” Simultaneously, advances in biomedical technologies (e.g., the rise of CRISPR‑like gene‑editing concepts and personalized medicine) made the idea of a literal cure feel both imminent and ethically fraught. In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) faced austerity cuts, and public discourse frequently revolved around “fixing” a broken system.
Mona Wales’ “The Cure (Pt 1)” can be read as a cultural response to these overlapping anxieties. By employing the language of medical instrumentation (heartbeat monitors, stethoscope samples) alongside glitch‑laden digital artifacts, the piece foregrounds the tension between technological optimism and human vulnerability.
The opening is built around a continuous 3 Hz sine wave, calibrated to the average resting heart rate of a human adult (≈72 bpm). By subtly modulating its amplitude with a low‑frequency oscillator (LFO) that mirrors a EKG waveform, Wales transforms the listener’s own physiological state into a resonant feedback loop. The result is an uncanny bodily immersion: the audience literally “feels” the beat as if their own pulse were being monitored.
Interspersed are sampled scalpel clicks—short, high‑frequency transients processed through a bit‑crusher to evoke the metallic snap of old‑school medical tools. These sounds are panned dynamically across the four speakers, creating a sense of movement through a surgical theatre. missax 20 10 09 mona wales the cure pt 1
The visual collage accompanying the audio consists of four projected loops, each occupying a quadrant of the projection wall.
These visuals are synchronized loosely with the audio: the x‑ray flickers in time with the heart‑beat drone; the graffiti’s erasure coincides with the glitch rhythm; the cell macro‑shots appear when the spoken word “code” is heard; and the corrupted poster materializes as the children’s choir swells. The interplay of analog (x‑ray, graffiti) and digital (glitch, corrupted file) underscores the central tension between organic healing and technological remediation.
On the evening of 20 October 2009, the London‑based experimental collective Missax premiered a striking multimedia piece titled “The Cure (Pt 1)”, a work by the enigmatic composer‑visual artist Mona Wales. Though the event was modest—held in a repurposed warehouse in Shoreditch and documented only by a handful of grainy YouTube uploads—it has since acquired a cult status among aficionados of post‑digital sound art. The piece functions simultaneously as a sonic narrative, a visual collage, and a philosophical meditation on healing, memory, and the uncanny. The late‑2000s were dominated by the global financial
This essay will examine “The Cure (Pt 1)” from three complementary angles:
By the end, the reader should grasp why “The Cure (Pt 1)” remains a seminal artifact of its moment, and how it anticipates later developments in immersive, interdisciplinary art.
When the composition moves into its central segment, a looped 2‑second vocal sample from a 1972 soul track (“I’m feeling better now”) is granularly stretched and re‑sequenced, producing a “stuttered” effect reminiscent of time‑compression therapy in psychoacoustic research. The glitch rhythm—irregular, syncopated bursts of 8‑bit noise—functions as a metaphor for intervention, disrupting the monotony of the preceding drone. The opening is built around a continuous 3
The spoken‑word fragments are taken from a transcribed interview with neurologist Oliver Sacks, filtered through a formant shifter to render them simultaneously intimate and alien. The line “the skin remembers, the code rewrites” is repeated, underscoring a central motif: the body as both a biological repository and a digital script capable of being edited.
Although the original event drew a modest crowd (≈70 attendees), the piece quickly circulated online, where it was discussed in niche forums such as r/experimentalmusic and Post‑Internet Art Discords. Critics praised its “surgical precision” in sound design and its “poetic ambivalence” regarding healing.
In the years that followed, “The Cure (Pt 1)” influenced a wave of immersive health‑themed installations—notably the 2014 “Remedy” exhibit at the Barbican and the 2018 “Patchwork” soundscape at the Sundance Institute. Its technique of embedding biometric data (e.g., heart‑rate monitors) into composition has become a staple in contemporary bio‑feedback art.