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Track 1: Roboerotic
I've always thought robots are sexy. I get turned on by machinery, especially when it involves complex circuits and eloquent expressions of intelligent design. I once saw an image of a microchip onto which cells from a snail's brain had been grafted. The neurons acted as connectors for a chip whose processing capacity far exceeded that of the donor. I still consider this photo one of the most beautiful images I've ever seen.
Roboerotic is an homage to that tantalizing connection between machine and man, or digital and organic.
Musically, it started with a very simple bass line that somehow managed to draw everything else out.
Elizabeth Terry provided the violin parts at the end. |
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Track 2: The Persistence of Loving
This track is about the cyclic nature of relationships and the ability of love between two people to persist through the often painful vicissitudes of human drama. The opening notes were the seed of the entire piece. In hindsight, I realize that these swelling tones represent the breath, which in it’s eternal expansion and contraction reminds us that the Divine breath of Love is the foundation upon which all the worlds exist. |
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Track 3: And They Shall Speak With Tongues of Fire
In recent years I've spent a lot of time exploring electronic dance music, particularly Goa or Psychedelic trance. I’m fascinated by the unique sounds, shifting timbres, and trance-inducing rhythms of this music. Many of the tracks on Biophelia are the result of my explorations into these realms.
The title of this track describes the section at the end and the images it elicits in me. These include ideas such as the Christian Pentecost, the visionary experiences of Terrence McKenna, and the predictions of Rudolph Steiner that in the future, humans would sing their young into being. |
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Track 6: In the Shades of Ynis Witren
This was my first psy trance track, and it's also one of the darkest. The name draws from the mythology of the Grail stories, and particularly from the novel The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Ynis Witrin ("Isle of Glass") was the pre-Christian name of the Tor at Glastonbury, the mountain reputed to have once been the Avalon of legend. This piece is about the dark magic of the fairies, and the lands where one might spend an hour enrapt in their charms and come back to find that many years have passed. |
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Track 10: Call to Prayer
Call to Prayer is an arrangement of two traditional invocations: The Islamic “Athan Al-Fajr” (Call to Prayer) and the Hebrew “Reader’s Kaddish." This piece was arranged and first performed during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. At the time, I was thinking a lot about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of the common spiritual heritage the two peoples share. Call to Prayer features the voices of Ambra Lionstone and Egg Syntax. |
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