notes on
chasing brother angel
by tim lowly
This album hopefully stands on its own. These notes are merely to provide some background information for those who might be interested.
The over-arching structural concept of this album is fairly simple: the songs are organized loosely in relation to the course of a day starting with morning (“A Stone at Dawn”), through the mid-day (“Garden”) and ending with night (“939”), with “Fading” as something of a coda. Several of the songs were written in 2004 as I was preparing for a couple of art exhibitions: I had decided to write a song with each painting that I was making. The first pieces that I made, that is digitally constructed*, were “130” and “939” which I worked on over the winter of 2004-5. In June of 2005 Danny Bracken (friend, former student and member of the band Anathallo), pianist Matthew Ganong and I spent an intensive week recording basic tracks for several of the songs. I did the remainder of the recording and mixing over the next two years.
* About the term “digitally constructed”: I used Protools in a relatively primitive manner that probably has more in common with “musique concrète” than conventional contemporary electronic music. For what it’s worth, I did not use any synthesizers, drum machines or samplers in making this album.
a stone at dawn
130
- this piece was constructed digitally using a recording (made originally for a sound installation) of my daughter Temma breathing and making very subtle sounds which I shaped into something of a weaving chorale…
- Temma is profoundly disabled; among other things she is cortically blind, but she can hear… other sounds in this piece are from some of her sound toys
Riverside
- the second in a three song trilogy related to Temma, this song is sung as if from her perspective
- written while I was working on a large painting titled “River”
All Wrapped Up
- seemingly an absurdist nursery song, this piece builds with a somewhat ridiculously dense assortment of instruments (melodica, five guitars, two glockenspiels, two clarinets, piano, hand claps, bass, three voices, plastic tube, kick drum and various other percussion) only to fall away at the end
- “ceci n’est pas une pipe” refers to a painting of a pipe by Magritte which has the phrase written on the painting (“this is not a pipe”)
- this song is related to a painting I was working on titled “Wrapped” which visually quotes Bernin’s sculpture “Ecstasy of St. Teresa”
25
- written on the occasion of our 25th wedding anniversary this digitally constructed piece features feet crunching leaves (actually a very slowed down reversed glockenspiel), cicadas (in our front yard) and my wife Sherrie humming
Garden
- a love song I wrote for Sherrie using various garden metaphors
- that is her at the end washing dishes…
Orange Sun
- another digitally constructed piece based on a very well known song written by Rodgers and Hart in 1934
- each phrase of the song is reversed
- there is a scrambled Bach piano piece floating in there somewhere as well
Robin
- the glockenspiel intro is from the beginning of Bach’s Fugue 24 in B minor, which may have been one of the first pieces of 12-tone music
Brother Angel
- the title refers to the 15th century painter Fra Angelico
- I had been working on this song for a while, but only after Thomas Clement (husband of my friend and art colleague Wonsook Kim) gave me his bouzouki did this song come togetherthe contribution of violinist Ethan Adelsman in arranging the strings for this song was a critical contribution… it was the first time I had worked with a violinist and within a week of our meeting we had recorded these tracks (Elsewhere Adelsman contributes wonderful arranging and playing of strings on Anathallo’s CD Canopy Glow.)
Sandro
- the title refers to Sandro Botticelli (another 15th century Italian painter)
- there is also a reference to Pieter Bruegel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
- the percussive sound is a hammered dulcimer
- Matthew Ganong helped compose, arranged and sang several of the parts of the chorus at the end of this song
1969 - digitally constructed from a single sustained violin note Twilight Rise
- while working on the painting I was frequently listening the Portuguese band Madredeus… there are references to that band in the song
- this song was composed while working on a painting by the same name
1970
- building on “1969” this piece reflects on my youth and my first awareness of “the future”; that being exemplified by the year 1970… a specific experience that seems to have embodied that (or a similar) sense of possibility was watching a flock of thousands of geese take off over the plains in South Korea (where I spent much of my childhood)
Love Song
- adapted from a poem by the Korean poet Park Hijin
959
- the title refers to the length of this piece and to the minute prior to the dorm curfew at the boarding school I attended in high school in Korea
- other than a field recording of crickets in the park near my house, this song was entirely digitally constructed from a ten-second snippet of a recording of birds in a forest (yes, including that strange cello sounding thing that shows up mid-way)
Fading
- this song is related to a painting titled “Fade” which, like the song, is a meditation on the life and death of my father
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