This is primarily the story of the historic legal search (some have called it a 'raid') of the Florida retirement residence of Mar-a-Lago, owned by former President Donald J. Trump. The search which was conducted by federal authorities on the date of August 8, 2022 (48 years to the day of former President Nixon's resignation) in regards to the 'stolen classified documents' case currently being litigated by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith at the time of this album's publication.

Donald Trump has just been criminally indicted in this case 2 days before this album's release. NCN has worked on this project since the time of the initial FBI search. Some of the material pre-dates that event.

The bulk of the project primarily focuses on the immediate cultural, legal and political fallout from this event, told from a wide variety of sources taken from the news, commentators, comedians, musicians, pundits taken from the mediasphere at large, collated and remixed in an artistic and meaningful way by NCN, and uses references to popular culture as 'touchstones' in the telling of the tale.

It also takes a look, up front, at some relevant events and aspects of the case which pre-dated it, and by the end peers into the future, in somewhat comic and dramatic fashion both in speculation as to what is to come.

Remixes and mashups of the song 'Meet Your Master' originally done by the industrial rock group (aka the artist Trent Reznor) are used as a running leitmotif throughout the work, in relation to the 'Special Master' 'subplot' of the narrative. It is from their album 'Year Zero' (from 2007) which was a concept album meant to describe future events.

NCN found the ambiguous and dualistic nature of the point of view of this song's lyrics jibed well with the 'two ways' that this event was simultaneously viewed by both the left and the right of the political spectrum at the time. Sides that had been further polarized by Trump in the years leading up to the event, just as much as he sought to politically and monetarily capitalize on that polarization and still does to this date.

This album was originally going to be called 'The Special Master Special' but we thought of a better title for it. It shares some material with the recently released NCN album 'This Is The Way It All Ends (The Trump Indictment Mix)'. We will do more albums on this subject, most likely.

The total running time of this MEGA-album is: 19 hours, 19 minutes and 14 seconds, making it the longest/biggest album that NCN has produced to date.

This program was originally created with the working titles of 'Knock! Knock!' and 'The Special Master Special' and has been broadcast in intermediate forms, in whole and in part, between Aug. 2022, on The National Cynical Network bi-weekly audio webcast stream and the time of its release in album form on Bandcamp. Most of the individual pieces in this mix were painstakingly assembled by NCN and have never ever existed in this overall form before June 10, 2023. Many pieces herein were not created by NCN but rather were created by various mainstream, underground, obscure, or DIY artists and are being used (fairly) and accredited as best we can in this mix. All derived material has been somehow transformed (through some combination of editing, remixture, fragmentation or re-contextualization) here or is being used as a cultural touchstone or reference in order to capture a representation, as we see it, of the cultural conversation about the subject matter. It is NCN's hope and intention that our use of these artists' work increases their scope and their audience and gets them more attention. They deserve it. Please explore more of these artists' work through official channels. We feel that the artists referenced in this work, and the derived work used, are important, interesting and worthwhile voices in the cultural conversation that we are trying to portray and capture with this program.

PRO TIPS on how to listen to this program:

- Use headphones
- Take breaks. This is a long program. It is not necessarily meant to be 'consumed' all in one sitting. Think of NCN 'mega-album' programs not so much as traditional 'albums', but more like eclectic 'sonic photo albums' or 'audiobooks with music'. The best place to take breaks is when you hear an NCN 'Station ID' which identifies that you are listening to The National Cynical Network. This usually signifies that a temporal, or thematic change is taking place in the program.
- It is perfectly fine to listen to certain 'sections' ('The New Civil War', 'The Rat', etc.) of interest as these subsets sort of are 'albums within the larger album'.
- If you are listening to the program in tracked form (as it is offered on Bandcamp) then you should make sure that you are listening to the tracks in the numbered order and with GAPLESS PLAYBACK i.e. there should be no pause or blank space between tracks. If you do not listen to the program with gapless playback you are not getting the best and intended effect.
- Be sure that the 'mp3 gain' setting is checked on your digital player if you're listening to it on an mp3 player or on the computer in order to avoid any big jumps in volume or 'gain' that might be uncomfortable. NCN is a collage art enterprise and we're dealing with a lot of different audio sources here with different loudness levels. While we have done our best and made every effort to provide a comfortable listening experience, we are not professionals.
- Try listening to it in the background while working on the computer or even on long trips, like on an airplane or bus ride. The way these and other NCN programs are constructed (we find) is that they are both effective as a mental sonic 'wallpaper', because of the dynamic richness in form, but also rewarding listens if you also devote your entire attention to them, due to the crisp and compelling nature of the content and its sequences.

This program is also available at Phineas Narco/National Cynical Network's pages at SoundCloud, Mixcloud and archive.org in all-in-one-file formats. Bandcamp proscribes linking to these pages here, so you will have to look them up to find them.

Happy Listening!

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