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THE MEMORY TAPES OF JOHN I PEARL: Soundtrack Recording for Trilogy Work
Music composed and performed by James Farrelly, Author of The Pearl Trilogy.
The Memory Tapes of John I. Pearl, a work in the genre of magic realism, that chronicles the mythical, otherworldly journey into the beauty and terror of our world.
All three books in the trilogy are now available through Amazon in both paperback and e-book formats.
For over thirty years, I have been a home-recording enthusiast, moving through whatever evolving technologies my budget could manage on a social worker or teacher salary. Most necessary was the finding of a piano. In this instance a 1933 Lauter upright that made its way to our home on Saylor’s Lake close to the Poconos in 1981. I had been trained as a jazz drummer, veered toward rock and progressive forms, but I wanted to step outside from behind that sound palette or enlarge upon it if I could. After months of practice, I decided to purchase a 4 track reel to reel to learn multitrack recording. Then synthesizers started to further shape my interests. The Korg Mono/Poly, the first to arrive on the scene with all those knobs and buttons and wheels with which to play. I recorded and recorded over things until I felt I had captured something more or less complete rendering of the music I would hear in my head and heart. And those happy more than accidents that visited from time to time on a wave of its own. Then the African percussion instruments started to assert their privilege. And a fascination with ethnic as well as early music.
Piano, synths, African percussion, drum machines, environmental sounds. I branded the stuff I was doing as Whole Family Music and kept exploring. Around this time, I met some friends who had just started an 8 track recording studio, Red Rock Studio. Kent and Lois Heckman were the owners of the studio they had built within their farmhouse in Saylorsburg. Kent, especially as an engineer, provided me with a lot of sound advice on the studio as a compositional tool. In exchange for tutoring lessons for their son, and with whatever sparse funds I could scrape up every week or two, I worked on a number of sketches that became the cassette classic, Our Fires Return. Some of that music ended up being used as a soundtrack for a documentary about the return of the osprey to the Poconos after having been wiped out by DDT. Thanks to Thomas Ardizzone and Michael Fitch for that valuable learning experience in the production of the film, Return from Forever.
I’d like to acknowledge some of my favorite electronic artists beginning with Isao Tomita, whose landmark album, Snowflakes Are Dancing, introduced me at a young age not only to the world of synthesizers, but also to Debussy’s canon of Impressionistic works. Larry Fast’s Cords was especially fascinating to me and I wore out the grooves of that white vinyl offering. Larry’s Synergy project is well worth exploration and has certainly withstood the test of time. The dynamic triumvirate of Eno, Fripp, and Gabriel and later David Sylvian also helped feed my own experiments in ambient and world music. Finally, to all those inventors behind the evolution of MIDI, Sequencing, and Digital Audio Workstations—thank you for delivering the tools of what once could only be found in high-priced studios to the homes of Everyman.
- Genre
- Electronic
Contains tracks
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