21. Lost in the Floating Jungle
Your hoverpod lurches — reading your hesitation before you — then slows to a gentle whir.
The surroundings look too familiar.
[ Nudge your vehicle towards a buoy marker glowing with the words: Botanic Reserves Upway 26 ] —
The sign is pristine, indifferent, offering no uniqueness to distinguish it from the others you’ve passed.
Have you passed this point already? Could be multiple times by now.
You set aside wayfinding and look around.
It’s a breathtaking scene in every direction. The sing-song cooing of skylarks in groups, diamond-shaped leaves burnished by late afternoon sun, the frizziness of the foliage here at the topmost skyforest. Watered by updraft mists. Ever-present sun.
No one else is milling about this high; you’re above even the wispiest clouds.
Patches of forest-substrate thin out enough for you to glimpse roots extending down into the air below towards the next forest layer, stretching like toes searching for lake bottom. A few levitating signs sprinkled here and there, glowing the same broadcast:
DO NOT DISMOUNT. NO LANDING. NO CONTACT WITH RESERVES.
You imagine ascending the next channel for views above the canopy — but before the thought completes, your craft’s already whizzing at-speed.
As your flight instructors say, the telepathy takes days to get used to.
// Side B //
Great to see you and thanks for tuning in! You’ve just heard an excerpt from a solo performance at Artistania in Berlin, 2019 — scored with drums today, for fun and curio, special for this issue. We’ve veered off a musical side-road this week, to balance out different styles of the imminent track-storm coming up:
“Dernière Nuit” — my first release as a co-arranger & co-lyricist
“View from a Llama” — the first single off Travel Poems #3 (out October 6),
4 studio clips in this issue’s Proof of Play round-up, and
a secret composition from the next album, The Tributary.
Our co-conspirator cornucopia begins with Josephine Pia Wild, the world’s actual first handpan pop artist:
I was fortunate to collaborate with Josephine on the song’s arrangement, keyboard parts, and the English portion of lyrics. The song — French for “Last Night” — is about the experience of being image-projected onto by a lover who likely doesn’t know or care they’re doing so. There’s also a bitter seedling: the narrator knows she’s complicit.
The original, all-French version — lyrics co-written by Fabian Corre and Josephine Pia Wild — existed before Josephine decided to issue a mixed-language album. So we tasked ourselves with translation, transformation, and fitting the existing melody verbatim:
I love this way of writing lyrics: rapid brainstorming, puzzle-fitting, throwing around words and ideas, while always anchored to meaning. Head + soul + heart. I’m just getting started as a songwriter and I find the whole experience absolute dynamite.
Check out Josephine Pia Wild! More tracks to be unveiled soon 🧨
The Air Is Made Of Music
Speaking of cahoots, it’s finally time to introduce TAIMOM, the collaborative exhibition, the release concert, the transdisciplinary extravaganza, and the most adorable acronym1.
From Oct 2–6, together with 5 artists working across varied practices, we’ll put on an event series at The Ballery in Berlin, Germany, culminating in a blowout concert with interpretive dance and storytelling on the last day. Here’s me “inviting” the artists, scored with the upcoming single, “View from a Llama” (announcement) —
Travel Poems has been a 7-year journey from assembly, to recording, to release of all three chapters. It is perfect timing and synecdoche to the broader transition I’m aiming for as an artist: last week’s send-off of the final designs for CD-pressing, made from two of my favorite things, treasure maps + triptychs —
— to the next 5 weeks of introducing each fantastic artist, one by one. This mirrors my evolution towards tour-guide, towards facilitating experiences that are less about me, towards highlighting what cool stuff other people are doing.
This week, TAIMOM presents the astonishing Carolina Boettner, co-founder of Flusslab, and artistic visionary, combining disciplines from visual to mixed media. Her piece “The Residual in Scene” is an investigation into waste through science, art, and music (hello “Symphony for Algae” 💃) —
For our group exhibition, Carolina will present various stations of smell art, interpreting select song-postcard pairings of Travel Poems. It’s a must-visit. Follow along the TAIMOM instagram account for Carolina’s other showcases, the next artists coming up, and announcements of the exhibition’s live and virtual events.
Hat-and-Feet Tips
Wonderful live shows last week by Elsdeer and Mike Rauss.
Take 4 minutes to jot a list of delightful details from your day. Once you start reframing all peculiarities as delights — no matter how cringe, infuriating, failuresque — you’ve conquered the world.
I was just introduced to Margaret Watts Hughes, who took Cymatics (a.k.a. Chladni Figures) through her own gorgeous trajectories —
— by Elizabeth Shull, a contemporary artist (and fellow UCSC alum!) whose stunning creations illuminate mysteries I’m only beginning to learn of:
Unabated Proof of Play: 4 Entries
Day 208: “achilles waits to strike” —
Day 211: “cloud-shrouded gown drying on the rocks” (full log) —
Day 213’s song title is informed by an Amazing Grace lyric: “the days dissolve like snow” (full log) —
Day 219: “trial run of the kaleidoscope shuttle” (full log) —
Secret Chords / Hidden Rhythms
I’m trying something unprecedented.
There’s a wing of music I’m keeping away from public ears, because it is novel and exciting enough to be a trade top-secret.
It is a perspective on piano-playing, combining ideas that I have never heard combined before.
After a few years of diving into these combinations, simple truths have revealed themselves — so crystalline, so obvious — that I’ve a hunch that the idea will spread.
I believe that for most inventions and discoveries, being first is not terribly important. But in rare cases, it is.
This is one. Certainly I’ve never found anything else that appears to warrant such careful treatment — to warrant not publicizing it before it’s baked and ready for serving.
But instead of keeping the music fully private until the recordings debut to the world, I want to share these ideas with the Campfire Sparks readership. (There are many reasons for this too — the main one being that it’s important for the music itself.)
You, treasured reader, have a front row seat to a brand-new development in piano.
Without further ado: