The Dreamer of Ants The dreamer of ants, whispers And the night walkers enter. The house opens, unfolds – enfolds – doors close and our dream eyes open: The only way out is in. There is no time-trace-place, so we must go deeper. Even deeper. Ever deeper. In the boy’s haunted room, there’s a blindfolded girl reading from a book of dreams She kneels in the dark in so many ways While oceans crash against her skirted cliffs And we stand breathless; deathless. In a Moorish castle on stilts at the crossroads of all worlds Strings pluck the paths of the dreamers’ dreams. We hear, fear, feel and see everything, yet remember nothing. There is no time-trace-place, so we must go deeper. Ever deeper. Onward, sleeper. Upon our knees in a Shinto temple, wind whistles enchantments through us While red ribbons and bows tie us to our selves And all our dark reflections. As above At the office window trumpets play a serenade to those who scramble As below In the cold of a leafless Irish garden. In a cabin in the woods, voices creak their messages – A discordant wilderness – Brought from the mouth of the Canadian wilds. There is no time-trace-place, so we must go deeper. Ever deeper. O nightmare keeper. The red man floats in a sea of memory with an Origami bird pecking at his chest Because time is different here. So different. So: Hear! The dreamer of ants, whispers And the night wakers remember. Just a week to go now before the first shows for Time is different here... After a year of working on the project - exploring the extraordinary place that is Talliston, finding our own path through its spaces & stories, developing our concept of Talliston as a dreaming place - we are putting the final touches to the event.
Over 2 hours of soundscapes have been created for the rooms (this will form the basis of an album for our guests to take away & enjoy after the show), which forms the background, activating the spaces while the live performer-musicians interact with the audience. A wealth of texts & materials has been gathered, clothing found, voices recorded, dreams explored & shared. Now all that remains is to arrive in the space & release our dreamworld of sounds & other materials to mingle with all that Talliston offers, & awaken our characters to greet our guests. We look forward to seeing you soon! A host of personas hesitantly coalescing, fading in & out but gradually writing their identities: one finds himself slipping between uncertain times & places, haunted by faint sounds of jazz; another becomes every night the conduit for the dreams of others as well as her own; a master musician arrives at an impossible place to entertain weary travellers, & a stream of voices - voices from Scotland, from Japan, from Italy & North America - spill dreams into the air...
A flurry of materials assembles itself from the jetsam of dreams, to become unlikely tools for divination.... & the sounds: lost musics haunt the corners & passageways; birds who will never exist accompany disembodied singers; the countryside dreams of rail travel & carnivals, while the wilderness winds find themselves the disconsolate geists of floorboards, cutlery & the broken strings of a banjo. The spiced winter punch you dreamt of once in 1993 is warming on the stove - we hope you can join us in February for a unique experience as the dreams of Talliston find their way into our world to mix with your own... tickets here new soundcloud page with audio teasers here John Trevillian, creator of Talliston, writes:
INVITATION TO VIEW Now on Historic Houses.org The new tours for 2019 are all online at the Historic Houses website. https://tickets.tygit.com/shop/dates The setting for Time Is Different Here... can also be visited as part of the Invitation To View scheme. Now part of Historic Houses, Invitation to View offers visits to privately owned houses and other places of interest, many of which rarely open to the public. The scheme is unique in that individuals can buy tickets to visit a place of their choice on the dates in our calendar without being part of a group. Many properties do not open for anyone else and, normally, the owner takes charge of the tour. Those properties that do open to the general public make sure that Invitation to View visitors get something extra. Our visitors really do get to see behind closed doors. For enquiries about Invitation to View tours, group visits and brochure requests, please ring 01284 827087. If you wish to book tours directly over the phone please call 01946 690823. Talliston is certainly difficult to describe, but I think the word ‘surreal’ is a good place to start. Representing so many eras and places inside one house left us with many different potential musical influences to contend with - a possible stumbling block in creating an event that enhances, rather than disrupts. However, as we’ve mentioned before, the Talliston’s dreamlike quality struck us as an interesting line of thought to follow.
To gain insight into dream-logic and generate ideas that could be used in our event, we began compiling our dreams in a document (otherwise known as ‘The Dream Chamber’). Here’s a little peek into what goes on behind our eyelids at night... * * * “Home” in a dream is always your childhood home, but sometimes ‘the garden’ is the tiny shattered yard of a friend’s house 200 miles away, & the street, despite being the one your childhood home was situated on, will eventually become one of the wide avenues linking Chorlton to the rest of Manchester. On this street it’s always the middle of the night, the lights a queasy sodium yellow. These spaces sometimes seem bolted on to each other (e.g. in the manner of a poorly executed school ‘Design & Technology’ assignment from the early 90s), & at other times float inside one another in an uneasy sharing of the same dimensional coordinates. * * * I’m queuing up to go swimming at a huge complex that resembles a grotty northern casino. Once I’m in and have taken my time getting changed I’ve lost the people I came with and it’s unthinkable to find them here as there are dozens of floors each with a complicated network of pools, some interlinked, some separated by brown carpeted areas with leather armchairs and round tables that are also leather clad…. ...I climb on to a stack of the leather padded round tables and look down. I get a true perspective of the layout from here and start to piece things together in my mind but I suddenly become aware of how precarious my situation is. The stack starts to wobble and as I fall I decide to close my eyes and relax as real, sleeping me takes over and decides that I’ll either land in water or wake up. * * * People are lined up either side of a cloister and taking it in turns to perform a song or piece of music to contribute to the festivities. I've lost sight of Gary and think it's a shame he's missing it as he'd love this. He appears just in time for it to be his turn and, thankfully he has his trumpet handy. He starts an improvised duet with a trombone player opposite him who I don't recognise. It's great, loads of energy and intricate beautiful textures. The trombone player's initial motif was really cool but he doesn't go back to it. Tullis is just a little way down the line and, we all know how important it is to Tul to squeeze all you can out of a motif... He is obviously frustrated and feels this other trombone player has missed an opportunity BUT he feels it would be rude to get his trombone out... So he jumps up, runs down the line to where the two guys are playing and starts singing this first motif, over and over, dancing around the performers as they carry on, happily including him in their piece. * * * In the dining room at a childhood home. My sister looked out of a window that shouldn’t be there onto the wrong street. Instead of a park, there was just a brick wall. She planned to redecorate the street so it looked exactly like another street she knew. After our meal, we improvised. I sat in the music room and played the piano. She sat at the bottom of the stairs (which were the wrong way around) and played various objects that I couldn’t see. In our dreams, identity of place and person shift and change. The ‘narrative’ seems entirely logical while it is experienced but upon waking the stranger aspects become clear. Elements of this may end up within the walls of Talliston, as, indeed, may some of your own dreams… Rachel Back in January, Rachel & I made our first visit to Talliston House & Gardens to experience directly its spaces, its sounds, smells & histories, & to meet its creator John Trevillian. Getting beyond the indirect contact of webpages, pdfs & emails & immersing ourselves in the House as an environment was immediately stunning, almost shocking & then exciting in the way the place lives through the physical experience of it - being in it - & subsequently through a variety of recollective perspectives, where (as Simon McBurney reminds us in his essay for Complicite's Mnemonic) to remember is to do literally that - to piece together (re-member) disparate elements into a patchwork whole (as far as we know, memories are not stored whole in the brain, but diffused, with different elements in different areas). This means certain details leap out with a crisp clarity, whereas others retain a shadowy, dreamlike quality.
Rachel & I have had 7 months or so to ferment this initial encounter, allowng the imaginative & somatic experience of the house to settle & letting ideas & concepts for our event evolve & develop. The event is however a collaborative endeavour, not only between the two of us, but also with our performers, Gemma Bass & Gary Farr of the Vonnegut Collective. We reached a point where no more development could happen until Gemma & Gary had seen Talliston & met John, & so we arranged a weekend there, where Rachel & I would spend a more immersive period at Talliston, sleeping & eating there, & trying to put some of our ideas into context & practice. Gary & Gemma joined us for the Sunday, & it was an excellent experience to have our simmering ideas electrified by the same sort of immediate reaction from the Vonneguts as we'd had months before. Bringing our performers into the space confirmed some plans & jump-started the excitement that knowing a performance will work brings, & the almost jittery excitement of feeling the urge to push the project forwards. Each of us has a room which speaks to them the most; each has ideas dear to them that they want to find appearing in the event. All of us share strong feelings for what the event should be, what sort of experience our guests should have, & it was a pleasure to discover that we agreed on many important things, & to find disagreements that will prove the essential grit to form the pearl in the oyster. Rachel, Gary & Gemma provide their own takes on things below, giving hints of where this event might go. Photos from the visit can be seen here. Our next communication will make more explicit (without entirely giving the game away) what the event will be, tasters of what our guests might expect, the beginnings of where their journey might take them, but for now.... Gavin * Talliston's dream-like quality was a main point of discussion over the weekend. During one such conversation, Gemma suggested we could record our dreams to explore the different elements. In doing so, I noticed a connection between my dream-life and Talliston. My dreams are often set in scenes that, upon waking, seem to have no connection to one another - for example, one night I went from a music storeroom in a music school I used to attend, to a racetrack from which lava oozed and trickled, to a white hotel room where the view showed the fish in the sea in surprising detail. These changes were as abrupt as walking through a doorway and, during the dream, they made complete sense. In the same way, while staying at Talliston, the layout of the house began to seem logical to me. Of course you walk up the stairs in Italy and end up in a room in Scotland, who would have it any other way? It is only afterwards, when you try to explain the experience to someone, that you realise how illogical it seems... Perhaps our event in Talliston will have the same effect - a journey that carries you through the house, as if in a dream, and will be difficult to describe to anyone who has not experienced it. Rachel * Having heard so much about Talliston House and Gardens it was great to finally arrive there to plan our performances. Although I knew that this remarkable place is situated on an unremarkable street, it still took me by surprise. A nearby neighbour was washing his car. ‘Does he know?’ I thought. ‘Is he in on the secret?’. Something magical this way lies. It immediately became apparent that the advice of my colleagues that this was a place that had to be seen in person to be fully appreciated was spot on. Over the course of the next hour or so as we were shown around by John, its creator, this whole project came to life in my mind and took on new complexities as we delved further into the labyrinth of the house and the stories behind it. The idealist in me applauds John’s ethos of making his house all the places he’d most like to live in at once, and I was struck by the openness of a physical manifestation of one man’s desires and imagination...and there we were, free to explore it. John’s vision is fully formed, and meticulously mapped out. So once becoming more familiar with it, ideas of how to create our own journey here and perform in such a space came quickly. The whole experience felt like a dream, and that is something we can capture and play with. There is mystery and intrigue here and though it feels other worldly, there is also a search for personal meaning that hugely appeals to me. Gary * I know for a fact that I am in a lot of people’s contacts as ‘Gemma Violin’ so as to remind them who I am and what I do. This gets a little confusing sometimes as my name is actually Gemma Bass and there is a particularly good bass player in the North West who is also called Gemma, but that’s another story… I have a feeling, however, that John, the creator of Talliston, might be on such good terms with his taxidermist that he just has him in his phone as ‘Frank’, or ‘Geoff’ or whatever his name is. The character and expression in the faces of every fox, squirrel and raven in this remarkable home gives an inkling of the personal nature of the quest of its owner. Talliston feels to me now as John’s vivid imagination and innate attention to detail given form – his busy and inspiring brain turned inside out for us all to visit and walk around in. But it’s not all about him, not for a moment, we are invited to search among it and find things we can connect with, which then connect us with him but also with each other and people form our own lives and histories. But, further still, it opens the questions up to each of us: where and when in the world would I most like to have Sunday morning breakfast? Maybe I haven’t been there yet, maybe it’s time I went looking for it… In terms of our project, at first I was worried that the house is so full, so complete, that adding anything to those rooms would detract from the experience. But thinking more on those personal connections and the dreamlike quality of stepping from one place and time to another with no rhyme or reason, maybe that’s the way we should go. Dreams are something else we all have in common, whether we remember them or not, but they are so private (just like John’s imagination was before Talliston), it would be a real gift for an audience to get to experience someone else’s dream, to walk around it and find something that they can relate to. Music is so personal and so internal, it might just be the perfect medium for exploring that. Gemma John Trevillian writes: I created Talliston to be a feast for the senses. Soundscapes were a wonderful addition of depth, colouring the experience of each of the rooms with a mix of both hidden speakers and visible period pieces to create the various levels of sound required. While sound added another layer of immersion in each location, as the house began to be finished I thought, how far can I push this? What more can be done in Britain’s most ordinary house? Everyone treats Talliston as if it is some ancient mansion set in its own estate somewhere deep in the countryside. No one sees it for what it truly is… and early on the idea of bringing music, poetry, song and story into the fabric of the times and places we had created paved the way for the unplugged acoustic gigs, open mic poetry evenings and story circles that have taken place there. Time Is Different Here… will soon be part of that tradition. To illustrate some of the wonderful and extraordinary acts and evenings, we began our own YouTube channel, TallistonTV (an obvious nudge to the fact that there is and has never been a working television in the house). This has been the perfect way of showcasing some of the local and international talent who bought into the wonderful madness of performing in a semi-detached ex-council house in Essex. Here are a few bios and links to the various musicians that have entertained us: Clive Carroll Guitar phenomenon Clive Carroll’s masterful compositions, coupled with his versatility and unparalleled technical virtuosity, have rendered him one of today’s most admired and respected guitarists. Clive newest CD, “The Furthest Tree”, was released in May 2016 and is already being hailed as some of his finest work to date. Leddra Chapman Leddra's debut album ‘Telling Tales’, was acclaimed as ‘pitch-perfect acoustic pop’ (The Independent). Debut single ‘Story’ (a track championed by Sir Terry Wogan) was playlisted by BBC Radio 2. This period of time culminated a televised live performance of the single on ITV’s This Morning. Follow up singles Summer Song and Edie were also playlisted by BBC Radio 2. Leddra has toured with the likes of Tom Jones, Katie Melua and Ed Sheeran. Cara Winter (featuring Nick Cooper) Cara currently has two self-released albums to date with album number three due for release early 2012. The debut album ‘Butterfly’, recorded at 18 years old, was greatly received, with the title track ‘Butterfly’ being picked as a favourite by judges of a BBC Singer/Songwriter competition. PRS Magazine also hailed Cara Winter ‘An artist to watch out for!’. ‘Peter And The Whale’, Cara’s sophomore album saw a more mature voice emerge which inspired this acclaim from Grammy winning Producer/Mixer, Simon Gogerly: “Cara’s music is haunting and elemental, evoking images of the sea and ghostly carnivals as her warm voice drifts over pulsating piano and strings.” Live, Cara weaves an intimate web around her audience skilfully weighting the pure musicality of performance with a natural and honest audience rapport. Wrapt in silence and wonder. The Floe The Floe are an Essex based singer-songwriter duo Sarah Springett & Liz Townsend. Their sound sweeps effortlessly between breathtakingly heartfelt Adele-worthy piano ballads to impassioned angst-driven electronica, drawing on influences such as Massive Attack, Portishead and other luminaries in their field. At the heart of every Floe song lies Townsend's multi-instrumental musicality, Springett's melodic and distinctively direct lyrics and two incredible voices. Talis Kimberley Combining the magical and the everyday with a deft hand and a unique viewpoint, Talis Kimberley is a performer watch.Working either solo or with her band, Talis is equally at home in the intimate setting of an Arts Centre or on a festival stage. Her material deals with subject matters as diverse as Quince Jelly, Peak Oil, and the hypothetical BBC commentary on Greek history. Her compelling lyrics are wrapped in multi-layered melodies and arrangements which showcase the songs perfectly. You can never be sure whether Talis’ next song will move you to tears, laughter or dance – or possibly all three! Playing Rapunzel Playing Rapunzel are an energetic folk duo who share, in powerful harmony, songs of story and myth. Marilisa Valtazanou (guitar, voice, and most other instruments) was born in Iowa, raised in Greece and now lives in London; she celebrates her multinational background by having a song in an obscure language for every occasion. She is easily recognised as the band member who will fearlessly play any instrument, including mandola, flutes, percussion, and even electric double bass. Mich Sampson (piano, voice) is a lively East Londoner who directs choirs by night, teaches singing by day, and performs synagogue music by weekend. She has been guest of honour at filk conventions in the UK and USA, and her album Just Beyond raised over £1000 for Cancer Research UK. Kevin Pearce Essex singer/songwriter Kevin Pearce has never been one to rest on his musical laurels.He’s back with So On which by his own admittance is the culmination of what has gone before yet at the same time is a more focused and distilled version of Kevin’s eclectic approach to music making.
This article was originally written for Talliston Times by John Trevillian. Our senses make life meaningful. In fact, it can be said that what is experienced through the senses is life itself. Seeing and hearing are the basic fundamentals of life and as much a necessity as human nourishment as food and water. Though both of the higher senses may seem to be of equal importance, it is not often realized that hearing has the greater effect in determining the character of our lives. In fact, hearing has traditionally been regarded as the highest, most powerful of the senses which is probably why music is arguably the highest and most influential of the arts to many people. Patrick Drummond, Ardmore’s veteran sound editor with over 30 years experience, summed up the joys and motivations of working in the (often unfairly overlooked) sound department, saying: “The last creative brushstroke that is put onto a film is the soundtrack. A real joy can be felt as life is breathed into a film story conceived of many years before…” Films show clearly that sound is undoubtedly a vital element not only in movie production, but also in our life’s at large. Can you imagine Jaws without John Williams’ score? Psycho without those grating strings as Janet Leigh is mercilessly knifed in the shower? And the most important aspects of sound are those qualities which convey emotions. It is through the different expressive qualities of sound that we learn the various nuances and subtleties of emotion. This enormous range of gradations in our emotional experience is communicated most often through the sonic arts, thereby saving us the need to have corresponding real-life experiences. The Sound of Music There are various reports exploring the effects of ambient noise on creative cognition. Research suggests that it’s harder to be creative in a quiet space, while loud workplace can be frustrating and distracting. But there is such a thing as having enough noise to work and the mix of calm and commotion in an environment like a coffee house is proven to be just what you need to get those creative juices flowing. There are even companies like Coffitivity who provide an app that plays coffee house murmur – and I’m listening to it now as I type these words in the race to meet the Talliston Times deadline! Being a little more technical, here’s some more info on how ambient noise can affect creativity. Results demonstrate that a moderate (70 dB) versus low (50 dB) level of ambient noise enhances performance on creative tasks and increases the likelihood of innovative products. A high level of noise (85 dB), on the other hand, hurts creativity - with different music structures affecting different types of creativity activity (such as writing and painting). And as Talliston was designed specifically to inspire creativity, sounds were always going to be integral to that storytelling palette. TALLISTON’S SOUND SYSTEM
Hidden in the Victorian Boiler Room is the sonic nerve centre for the entire house, allowing multiple levels of ambient SFX and music to flow into every room and location of the house – including the gardens A World of Sound In each location of the house and gardens, great pains have been taken to mix both hidden speakers and visible period pieces to create the various levels of sound required. A good example of this is the Treehouse Sanctuary, where quadrophonic speakers surround guests with the noises of birds, creaking tree trunks and the village noises below, while also incorporating a reproduction 1960s stackable threespeed record player/radio from Steepletone Products. Based on original 1960s designs and with a red leatherette finish, this item had to look new to the period rather than buying an authentic antique. Below sit a variety of easy listening vinyl albums to bring a little Bacarach into the ambience. For variety, the sound effects (SFX) can be interchanged to create a high wind scenario and also rainstorm (for the wet season). Visitors have commented that the room actually feels like it is moving in the wind – and a great illustration of how persuasive the element of sound is. Outside, secreted in porchs, lantern bases and even a bird box external speakers provide sounds of the Canadian wilderness, village life and folk bluegrass to blanket and compliment life outdoors. In this way, an underlying mood is created, and if you do explore further inside the Boiler Room (our coal-black cupboad under the stairs in the Victorian living room), you’ll find drawers of individually created CDs and iPod players crammed to the gills with music and SFXs ranging from Big Band anthems through Nordic folk to spine-tingling creeks and scuttling noises that come as if from nowhere in the Haunted Bedroom. The entire final effect completes the journey of senses through the house – a journey that starts every morning at 06:45 when the entire house switches on for our unique version of the morning alarm call… Some attributes of Papa Legba: loa of crossroads, ways & thresholds; facilitator of communication, speaking all languages; speaker & way-keeper between the world of the living & of the dead; he is syncretised with St Anthony, patron saint of lost things.
One of the interesting & trickier questions in thinking about making an event for/with/through/in Talliston is the relationship of the spaces to each other & how this affects those experiencing the house itself & any event therein. Each space (room or garden) has - is - its own time zone, location, has its own multi-layered history, & its own sound & scent. There are no neutral in-between spaces to buffer the transitions - any space between rooms is a place in in its own right (the palazzo Hall of Mirrors stairway & entrance vestibule filled with clocks, the Fountain Courtyard), so the visitor to the house moves instantly between space, place & time. For a visitor on a guided tour of the house, this can be exhilarating even as it can be disorientating, the labyrinth pathway dissolving a sense of conventional layout, while the guided aspect provides a continuous thread that stands in for a through-narrative (the umbrella narrative being the story of the house's transformation: conception, evolution & completion), as the visitor is dropped in & out of each room or garden's specific story. For an event like ours, things become more complicated. As we engage with the immersive natures & histories of the spaces, we are also evolving our own takes on them, as we develop ways of exploring the rooms & gardens using sound, performance & other elements. But this separates us from Talliston's overarching narratives - its creation history, the guided thread, & the new narrative introduced in the Stranger's Guide to Talliston novel - & this separation gives us an interesting problem, because however engaging we can make the experience of each space, the participants' overall experience risks being a dislocated, serial one of separated spaces without the satisfying accumulation serial structures can bring, or the warmth of comprehension of an overall through-narrative to tie the spaces together. So, this leaves us with some approaches to consider - we might highlight the dislocations, the labyrinthine disorientation, the juxtapositions & jump cuts; we might create our own through-narrative, tying the spaces together, guiding the experience of the participants; or we might find a way to smooth the passage between spaces whilst still leaving the narrative relatively unimposed, available to each visitor to craft for themselves. A possibility might be to reconsider the relationship of the spaces to each other - instead of fully separate spaces, one might conceive a situation where the spaces have been brought into contact with each other, where the thresholds, boundaries are blurring, & where (while each space retains all of its particular, engaging character, nuances & histories) elements might emerge (however tiny) & manifest, to indicate a strange overlapping or interpolation of the spaces - an approach which may open up ways to explore any of the ways our guests might experience the event. A question of stories: an intersecting, overlapping, emerging, layered, fragmenting constellation of stories & how they are experienced, & the bigger stories they coalesce to form? ***** Other notes: One of the most creatively seductive rooms in the house is the Room of Dreams, the Alhambra palace bedroom, whose travel-writer inhabitant has decorated the walls with souvenirs from her many journeys. The room itself, with its gauze net hazing the bed & is suggestion of a continuation beyond the window draws the visitor into a dreamlike state. The room is suffused by its own dreams, the dream of its own time & place, & the dreams of places travelled to & experiences lived - but the filtered light calls other possibilities & states of dreaming: the dreams brought in by creators & collaborators; the dreams of our audience; the dream states of the other rooms & their inhabitants; the dreams we follow; & it seems humans are not the only animals who dream.... Another room currently occupying my thoughts is the Haunted Bedroom, whose ambience perfectly captures its gothic narrative, a tale of hauntings & a dead child. But how else might we explore the idea of haunting, or hauntings? Haunting is a word we use more widely alongside the ghostly connotations - we are haunted by a melody or a phrase, an event or a place that resurfaces in our memories; places we return to time after time are our haunts - we ourselves haunt them; & this brings us back to being haunted by people, leading us back to our own & others' ghost stories. & what else does the room give us? what to make of the ceiling decorated wth children's stories & fairytales? having recently recovered childhood books of fairytales, whose text & illustrations had remained more embedded in memory than i had realised, perhaps this lends us another aspect to the hauntings this room might encompass... Gavin After our whirlwind trip to Essex, Gavin and I met with Gemma and Gary to discuss our ideas. This meeting cemented for me just how extraordinary Tallistion is - the distortion of time and place was difficult to explain and it became clear that, until Gemma and Gary had also experienced it, we would not be able to make any concrete plans for the content of our performance.
However, we had a great session coming up with potential ideas. We explored the different ways we could use the space and how we could interact with/enhance/become part of Talliston. Would it be more successful to allow members of the public to explore freely, or to guide them through each room? Could we change what people might encounter in each space, thereby increasing the feeling of an ever-shifting labyrinth? Will there be a 'story' behind the performance? If so, how clear or abstract would that be? Perhaps we could leave 'clues' to the story for people to interact with? What level of interactivity would create the best experience? etc etc... As you can see, there are more questions than answers at this point, but there's plenty to experiment with when Gemma and Gary experience the magic of Talliston for themselves. Rachel |
time is different here...
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