MEET YOU THERE [demo]

Feb9

This is a sonic painting of the book "Clay's Ark" by Octavia Butler. Created for my Afrofuturism class at Columbia College, taught by Denise Akpem. Here is my artist's statement for the assignment:


Although Octavia Butler jumps the narrative of Clay’s Ark between past and present and multiple characters throughout the book, I wanted to piece everything together in my sonic depiction in chronological order from the perspective of Eli. Surviving the crash of the spaceship named Clay’s Ark, Eli finds himself back on earth with inhuman powers that are symptomatic of an alien microbe infection. Throughout the book, there is often a struggle between harnessing the extraterrestrial curse and trying to hold on to his humanity. Despite his best efforts to keep the infection contained within a civil, isolated colony, it ultimately becomes too much to handle when the book ends with a gory bloodbath of a battle.

My sonic portrayal begins with a slew of random synth notes, imaging the crash and failure of the high tech space ship of Clay’s Ark. I took the first couple seconds of Kanye West’s “On Sight” song to depict the impact of the ship crashing, and the following parts depict his wandering away from the ship in the southwestern deserts. I also took parts of György Sándor Ligeti’s Requiem, which is the song that plays for the “Monolith” in the famous movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” I felt that it perfectly captured the feeling of an epidemic spreading, both internally and throughout the world. After the first introduction to this sound bit, I recorded myself playing guitar. I used filters and distortion to depict the overriding symptoms of the infection over humanity, but slowly cut the noise out to reveal the beauty that still lies within the infected individual and the colony. They had perfectly healthy lives, even with their own children in the colony (hence the sound of children, found on a random YouTube video), but ultimately the infection could not be eradicated. I decided to paint a battle using free gun and bomb sound effects from SoundBible.com, and showed Eli’s failure to contain the infection by reintroducing the Requiem song.


Eli's Journey

I wrote this song for my parents for Christmas 2011.

JONNYB