This fragment of an a-capella Arabic (?) song came along while scanning radio stations. Most of the times the selected audio fragment is passed in to the created soundloop, in this case I created the loop based on this song.
Unimarikmaree
You can’t help
“You’ve been violated… never been raped, huh. You have those movie scenes, where the girls eyes go all blank, because she’s gone to some other part of herself, to deal with the horror of what happens to her. It’s nothing like that. It’s filthy, and sweaty. He licks your face and wipes himself off in your hair. And when you try to scream, he punches you, so hard, you see […], then he goes at you again, ripping, things that you did even know that you had… I know you wanna help. But if you haven’t been there… you can’t…”
This emotional monologue is part of a one-minute monologue competition. This performance is from Coty Warn, she finished on the 4th place. You can see her performance on youtube (3:36)
The nice thing about the sound I added is the kind of words that are created by the filters applied to the synthesizers.
Whispering
“…Hello, it’s Violet.. today I’m going to be doing a whispering video.. and.. uhm… I don’t know. It’s pretty straight forward, I’m just.. uhm.. tell you a little bit about.. what’s been sort of going on in my life.” (…)
This is kind of a strange phenomenon on YouTube.. whispering video’s. There is even an official term for it, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR). On the CNBC website there is an article posted on this subject, Inside the bizarre world of YouTube ASMR video’s. The fragment I used for this creation is from a girl called Violet. If you like to hear more from her, search YouTube for VioletsVoice.
Lovely bones
I was slipping away, that’s what it felt like. Life was leaving me, but I wasn’t afraid. Then I remembered: “There was something I was meant to do, somewhere I was meant to be.” I was in the blue horizon between heaven and earth.
The days were unchanging and every night I dream the same dream. The smell of damp earth. The scream no one heard. The sound of my heart beating like a hammer against cloth and I would hear them calling, the voices of the dead. I wanted to follow them to find a way out but I would always come back to the same door.
And I was afraid. I knew if I went in there I would never come out again. Nobody, nobody notices when we leave. I mean, the moment when we really choose to go. At best you might feel a whisper, or the wave of a whisper, undulating down.
My name is Salmon, like the fish. First name: Susie. I was 14 years old, when I was murdered, on December 6, 1973. I was here for a moment. And then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life.
This is a Dramatic Monologue called “Lovely Bones” performed by Maddie Howard.
Watch her video on YouTube. She was born in 1997, so she would have been 17 there. An impressive performance! The text is from “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold.
“Susie Salmon, a young girl, narrates her murder and her journey in an in-between world, reflecting on her life and the lives of her family from a unique perspective.”
Here’s a clip “Susie Salmon | She’s dead isn’t she?” The last line is also the last line of this performance. And here’s the trailer for the film The Lovely Bones (2009).
My addition to all of this is, unfortunately, a bit mediocre. The YouTube performance is what it is, a powerful monologue, and with my music pattern behind it, it’s… something else.
Trouble
This cheerful melody was created in 2014, when I still had a Yamaha keyboard. As so often happens, it’s a recurring pattern. I remember having a lot of trouble getting this rather simple tune to fit neatly into the rest of the music. But in the end, I think it was a pretty cool result. I thought it would be fun to add some vocals, and that’s how I came up with Leona Lewis – Trouble (Solo Version) (UncommonSense Studio Acapella). And to my surprise, with a little good will, the vocals fit my melody quite well, without adjusting the pitch or BPM. Until about halfway through, when things go awry and become somewhat chaotic, but then the melody and vocals finally come together. Upon closer inspection, the lyrics are far from cheerful, which also gives the result an ironic undertone. I hesitated to put it on the website for a long time, because the vocals aren’t mine, of course, but hey, it’s been 14 years, and a little playfulness is allowed now, right?
Good Bones
“Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.”
For these ‘papa & mama’ samples, with that (for me incomprehensible) exclamation of a child, I was looking for a piece of poetry and came across this poem, by Maggie Smith.
Hollow men
The hollow men, by T.S. Eliot
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
This is a bit tricky… I believe this 1925 poem is now in the public domain, but unfortunately I can’t remember the name of the artist or the link to the source. And the music is sort of an “in-between” harmonica sound from the Rolling Stones of a song I can’t remember either…Sorry! And what I add to that is minimal.. just a simple rhythm and some reverberation in the voice. But it goes together so very well, don’t you think?
Homecoming
Homecoming: Anse La Raye
Derek Walcott
Whatever else we learned at school, like solemn Afro-Greeks eager for grades, of Helen and the shades of borrowed ancestors, there are no rites for those who have returned, only, when her looms fade,
drilled in our skulls, the doomsurge-haunted nights, only this well-known passage under the coconuts’ salt-rusted
swords, these rotted leathery sea-grape leaves, the seacrabs’ brittle helmets, and
this barbecue of branches, like the ribs
of sacrificial oxen on scorched sand;
only this fish-gut-reeking beach
whose frigates tack like buzzards overhead, whose spindly, sugar-headed children race pelting up from the shallows
because your clothes, your posture
seem a tourist’s.
They swarm like flies round your heart’s sore. Suffer them to come, entering your needle’s eye, knowing whether they live or die, what others make of life will pass them by like that far silvery freighter threading the horizon like a
toy; for once, like them, you wanted no career but this sheer light, this clear, infinite, boring, paradisal sea, but hoped it would mean something to declare today, I am your poet, yours, all this you knew, but never guessed you’d come to know there are homecomings without home.
You give them nothing.
Their curses melt in air.
The black cliffs scowl, the ocean sucks its teeth, like that dugout canoe a drifting petal fallen in a cup, with nothing but its image, you sway, reflecting nothing.
The freighter’s silvery ghost is gone, the children gone.
Dazed by the sun you trudge back to the village past the white, salty esplanade
under whose palms dead fishermen move their draughts in shade, crossing, eating their islands, and one, with a politician’s
ignorant, sweet smile, nods, as if all fate
swayed in his lifted hand.
I had set this poem to three musical patterns, actually just to try it out, but they persisted, and on reflection, I find it quite funny how the experience of the text changes with the different soundtracks.
Don’t look at me
Unfortunately, again I have no idea where I got this recited text from, sorry about that. I think it fits nicely with the simple melody. It ends with a piece of music from Vocaloid, Japanese music that is confusing and constracting, and to me it fits the text read in a strange way.
Bacuda
This is a line of acapalla chant sung by a – I presume, young man. I slowed down, distorted and multiplied this and added some ambient sounds.