Hi everyone!
This is one of those "now for something completely different" moments. I decided to share this on the off chance that there's someone on this site who might have an interest in some pure sound design. There's very little mainstream "musical" content in this particular track, but I spent quite a bit of time on it as I recorded and engineered it almost entirely from scratch using various items in my immediate environment.
To give a bit of background before I show it, it's a soundscape intended to play fairly quietly as the underscoring for a somewhat avant-garde rendition of the poem I'm about to write out. The poem (at least the copy I was given) does
not have any author attribution, so I don't know who it's actually by. If anyone recognizes it, feel free to let me know.
Anyway, so the soundscape accompanies a group of about fifteen actors as they perform a choreographed dance/choral reading of the text. I don't want to explain any specific elements and what I intended them to represent because the whole idea is to see how people interpret it. Without further ado, the poem:
HUNGER
I come among the people like a shadow.
I sit down by each man's side.
None sees me, but they look on one another,
And I know that I am there.
My silence is like the silence of the tide
That buries the playground of children;
Like the deepening of frost in the slow night,
When birds are dead in the morning.
Armies trample, invade, destroy,
With guns roaring from earth and air.
I am more terrible than armies,
I am more feared than cannon.
Kings and chancellors give commands;
I give no command to any;
But I am listened to more than Kings
And more than passionate orators.
I unswear words, and undo deeds.
Naked things know me.
I am the first and last to be felt of the living.
I am Hunger.
As a matter of interest, the actors are performing the work literally as I post this. I was not able to attend, unfortunately, but I know that they'll do great.
"Hunger" Soundscape
Thanks for checking it out, if you do, and see if you can follow the story in the soundscape. Lost yourself in it and see where it takes you - I'd be interested to hear.
