A Chronicle Of Lost Sunsets :: part eight
Current mood: inspired
Category: Music
After the unrelenting cold of my last Chronicles installment I thought I would go to the other side.
Antipode. The opposite side of a planet. From December's snow to a land of Forever Summer. From a riverside to the sea. From dusk to dawn.
At 3:30am I woke from my falé beneath the cool of Tumutumu mountain on the American Samoa island of Ofu and made my way outside into the quiet dark. I followed a road along the shore, Crux, the Southern Cross, my only companion just over my right shoulder. Onto a starlit beach and up on a large lava bolder, I sat and waited for the light.
And soon the stars faded and the color returned to the world. The planet turned from the cold night of space and warmed its blue oceanic face in the light of its yellow sun.
Somewhere it was snowing in wintertime, but not here. Somewhere the was sun setting into black and white night, but not here. Somewhere there was a war, but not here. Somewhere was someone with whom I could've shared this simple but abundant bounty, but not here. Somewhere else I would've slept late, but not here. There was only the quiet day awakening and unfolding from the firmament above the mirror of the lagoon just for me, just for today.
For this was the ordinary yet unique morning of December 27th as I experienced it alone on a forgotten and far distant shore.
This download also contains the music I wrote for the end of the first intermission which was recorded during production week after our director JC Luxton asked me to extend the music he'd selected for that point in the show. Since this piece was written and recorded at the last minute I was unable to put it on the CDs we had at the show.
I've also added a mix of what the rest of the first intermission would've sounded like if I had been asked to score it with all original music instead of the film music JC used for the first nine minutes of the intermission. This is manifested in the downloadable version of the album as several minutes of new soundscaping to score the transfer of Sigismund from the tower to the palace. That's right . . . even though the show closed two months ago, I've continued to work on it right up until this week!
More information is on the blue :: infinite website.
A Chronicle Of Lost Sunsets :: part seven
Current mood: mellow
Category: Music
There was no sun any longer, there was only the cold and the pale, dead, shadowless light of a fading day.
The stillness was all-consuming. The cold wrapped around me like the clothes of a dead man. Near dusk on another anonymous Monday, I pointed the camera east, for the sky was only chalk and ashes from horizon to horizon above a world bled of its colors.
I was by a river, but it slept in stillness deep in an ice-blanketed bed. Near a backwater, I hid from the cold in my car and kept the engine running as my camera filmed the stillness. The car was parked in a city at rush hour, though there was no movement or traffic anywhere to be seen.
Later, as the sky began its slow bruising to periwinkle night lividity, I collected the camera from the stump (I have no tripod), paused to capture some photographs of the dead woods, and headed for home to compose music for an ice box. Music for an approaching snowstorm. Music of a dying piano, echoing and decaying in a frozen field, distant, distant. Music that would be like the tolling of a great bell in land where time has stopped.
An somewhere inside me it would be music for a dream of running away to a far, warm place and where I'd only have to remember the winter.
A Chronicle Of Lost Sunsets :: part six
Current mood: sad
Category: Music
The hills were hollow all around. October had ended and history slept in flooded graves everywhere, crowned with stone dissolved by time.
All those philosophies, all of those theories, all of those rich men and paupers, all equal, all finally without questions, without answers. Subjects became objects, people became waxen pupae in vaulted chrysalis, disremembered bulbs which flowered cold stone, eternal and ultimately forgotten.
The wind was frost as the dark blanket of October came down from the far white stars. As the camera absorbed these moments I wandered alone on the crescent limb of Halloween, the promise of morning too far away to even imagine.
There were no dreams. There was only the dark beneath the trees.
A Symphony For The Dying
Current mood: melancholy
Category: Music
Last night I slept alone, as usual.
The night was different, filled with the cool applause of leaves getting ready to tumble from the oak that lives outside my window. William Basinski's "The River" was on my mp3 player and let it fold into the quiet night sounds and my dreams. Basinski's piece is an artifact from his past, made years ago from primitive tape loops and random noises from a shortwave radio. It is hypnotic and elegant in ways one wouldn't expect, and it will take you away if you let go of the shore and trust it. It is not for everyone . . .
"The River" infected my subconscious, made things hyper-real. I floated on the gentle River as it colored my dreams and repeated through the new autumn night. I fell into the body of a boy standing in an autumnal backyard in 1978. The smell of leaves burning in a bright orange fire. The ghost of a long-dead dog sleeping on the back stoop. I saw my mother and brother, much younger, rakes in their hands, working beneath the bruised twilight of an October sky. I saw the Old House, torn down years ago, with warm light pouring from the windows, smelling of dinner and the furnace being turned on for the first time that year.
So many things gone. So many things changed. So much has died through all the intervening autumns.
When morning arrived and after some coffee, I sat at my computer and began composing a piece of music. It would be infused with that autumn evening of the past, those long-gone days, Basinski, Bradbury, an old yellow house on a hill, and the black skeleton trees that once held up a smoky sky.
It is an ode to a naïve boy who stupidly gave up his dreams and died in order to become me.
A Chronicle Of Lost Sunsets :: part five
Current mood: pleased
Category: Music
Beaches and sunsets are resplendent with their romantic cliché, of smiles and lovers. But I sat alone, brooding over my absinthe and "The Illustrated Man", dreaming of rocket ships, the old dusts of Mars, Venusian rains that never, ever stop, and trying very hard to not feel loneliness.
Beyond my book and my denial the great machine of the Earth's Ocean rolled and turned endlessly, green and wild as the drink in my glass and the thoughts in my mind. I grew older and imagined myself as a shell worn away by the sea until I was transparent. I watched as the fat-bottomed ostrich people, as distant silhouettes, picked up shells along the shore, and took them home to become forgotten relics of this day, this dusk.
The music in my moved with rhythms of cicadas heard from dark trees behind me. It hummed and roiled and rattled until the sun was snuffed in angry noise and color.
At length, a beautiful girl walked past, all smiles and youthful sunshine even in that newborn night and upon seeing her I was pulled from my dark reveries into a fresh perspective . . . a new light shone from within.
A Chronicle Of Lost Sunsets :: part four
Current mood: melancholy
The machineries of darkness, the expanse of shadow thrown in an alchemy of golden light. Coming up from the soles of my feet and to my inner ear I can feel the gears of the solar system turn on bearings of gravity and inertia. The water before me is a mirror to this strange device in which I exist.
And so I watch the subtle movements of light play across the sky in slow passing colors and I hear the music inside. It overwhelms the hiss of traffic on the nearby road and the sound of motorboats racing hard against the dying light. It is a slow, evolving, pattern of flux and faithful precision. It is the crépuscule implement turning all around me which clothes my spirit in its promise of stars and the coming night.
A Chronicle Of Lost Sunsets :: part three
Current mood: sad
"I say nothing but I hear everything In my building"
The upstairs neighbors' bed growns in mid-fuck A firetruck streams past in the street below The tree loses its burden of snow and pulls leaves from earth, air, and sunlight The billboard outside shifts from a message from God to a plea to gamble on riverboats A bum screams his madness to no one and everyone From the tree a bird taunts the cat in my window I make another pot of Yrgacheffe
This one is a domestic dusk taking shape from my front window of my downtown Rock Island cage . . .
inspired
thoughtful
rejuvenated
artistic
mellow
sad
melancholy
pleased