My composition dream cartographies – which can be heard here – is my response to seven haiku from Pat Boran’s Bull Island Haiku:
Waves themselves, their wings
flashing silver when they turn
as one – the starlings.The sky and the sea.
And that faint line in between,
drawn as if for me.Maids from Cabra West,
Painted Lady butterflies
up from Marrakech …All day by the sea,
meeting my own footprints now
out to look for me.Old man in a car
staring out to sea, Tosca
singing from the heart.Here’s our own selves there
in the water, looking up,
moonlight in our hair.First, a mystery,
the absence of things. And then?
Then the land, the sea …
Although Boran’s haiku present us with everyday images, those images are carefully displaced and overlaid, gently encouraging philosophical ruminations about space and time.
Concerning space, we have Boran’s beautiful phrase “here’s our own selves there in the water.” ‘Here, I am, there‘ – this quiet jolt to the ego suggests that the self unfolds across space rather than being pinned in a fixed location. But how can I simultaneously be both here and there? Are sight and hearing allowing me to traverse space by giving me ‘things at a distance’? Do I reach across space when I look at a photograph of myself, or when I remember my past self having been some place before? (First, a mystery.)
Concerning time, there are “my own footprints now out to look for me.” Imprints from the past survive in – or walk back into – the present. The now is not an isolated slice of time but a channel for history. As John Donne wrote:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were…
Recast in terms of time, no instant is an island. Re-recast in terms of space, and echoing Boran’s sensitivity to the geography and history of Dublin Bay, no island is an island. (First, a mystery.)
To mimic Boran’s overlaying of spaces and times, I treated my composition as a kind of sonic palimpsest by superimposing and interweaving different kinds of audio tracks.
Audio track #1 is a field recording of the sea which gently starts to fade out around the two, four and six minute marks, such that the volume of this audio – like Boran’s starlings – mimics the motions of the waves themselves. The sea makes a louder return near the end of my composition. For just as the ocean has created Bull Island, it may also take it away – “if a clod be washed away by the sea”…
Audio track #2 is a barely audible drone generated from a map of Bull Island using Photosounder and Audacity:
Although this drone is quiet, the shape of Bull Island is always present, always humming for us. (Here’s Bull Island there in the soundscape.)
Audio track #3 consists of seven short compositions, each inspired by one of Boran’s haiku. I wanted each fragment to utilise guitar in some way, and settled on the following approaches:
- “silver”: I played a short piece on my electric guitar, converted it to MIDI, then quantized and resampled it as an upright bass and electric piano;
- “faint line”: electric guitar resampled and replayed in Rigid Audio’s Grainstates plugin;
- “butterflies”: live acoustic guitar;
- “my own footprints”: electric guitar processed in VCV Rack;
- “tosca (from the heart)”: MIDI piano accompanied by very quiet hum from my electric guitar pickups; there is also a faint vinyl crackle which I sampled from from a 78rpm recording of “E Lucevan Le Stelle” from Tosca;
- “our own selves”: electric guitar resampled and replayed in Rigid Audio’s Metawave plugin; and
- “mystery”: live electric guitar played into a looper pedal.
In order to mimic the mathematical regularity of haiku, each of the seven pieces is spaced exactly one minute apart, such that “silver” starts at 1m00s, “faint line” starts at 2m00s, “butterflies” starts at 3m00s, and so on. You can see the seven pulses of music quite clearly here:
In this way, the timer on your audio player should act as a “temporal map” so that you always know your rough location in dream cartographies. For example, the Tosca passage starts at 5m00s, meaning that those opening piano notes signal the very midpoint of the ten minute composition.
Audio track #4 was the final layer to be added to the sonic palimpsest – I quietly played audio tracks #1-3 backwards through Kilohearts’ Snap Heap plugin host, utilising the lush “Sweet Wide Reason” preset. This had the unexpected but happy effect of creating what I can only describe as “distant angel’s voices” at the close of the Tosca section (around 5m55s.)
Here is the final composition:
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Naviar Records for organising the Poetry in Sounds project, and Pat Boran for his inspiring poetry.
how the night came 