The Temple Bells Do Not Hear Basho (disquiet0227) by Nate Trier

My new year's resolution was to ignore any projects that didn't involve voice and/or narrative structure, but clearly I broke that vow with these Disquiet projects. So I decided to split the difference and try to include voice in future Disquiet projects.

The text for this 22nd-century art song comes from some of Basho's haikus, which I enjoy setting to music. I found a webpage of his haikus (http://oaks.nvg.org/basho.html) and clipped the ones that grabbed me. Then I arranged six of those into a short narrative. The plan was that reading all 6 would take 1 minute, so I would read them all 3 times in a row and then have 3 minutes of material.

The full lyrics:
The first day of the year: thoughts come - and there is loneliness; the autumn dusk is here.
None is travelling here along this way but I, this autumn evening.
Silent the old town...the scent of flowers floating...and evening bell.
Cloud of cherry-bloom...tolling twilight bell...Temple Ueno? Asakura?
Temple bells die out. The fragrant blossoms remain. A perfect evening!
Now that eyes of hawks in dusty night are darkened...chirping of the quails.
Swallow in the dusk...spare my little buzzing friends among the flowers.

I like this arrangement because it paints a short scene of the poet finding a moment of beauty in a predatory world (perhaps he finds some beauty in the predation itself).

However, reading them all ended up taking about 2 minutes. So I just stuck with that.

I found a chord I liked on piano: basically a Bb#11/A (in ascending order, A, Bb, D, F, D, E), and I recorded myself reciting all of the haikus in order singing just A. Then all the stanzas in order singing just Bb, then just D, etc.

After that I moved on to processing. I processed one track at a time while listening to all of the other tracks. I used 4 VSTs per track, mapping many parameters to the knobs and buttons of my Oxygen61 MIDI controller.

The end result kind of obscured the lyrics, but maybe it works that way.

Although I think this version is interesting, it wasn't quite what I imagined. So I made a second try, which is a little more restrained. https://soundcloud.com/triermusic/basho-hears-the-temple-bells

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More on this 227th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Record a piece of music in which what changes is the treatment of the notes that comprise a single chord”) at:

http://disquiet.com/0227/

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