I made this piece with one simple goal in mind: to help time pass enjoyably. Whether you're using headphones or a speaker system of some kind,  adjust the volume so that the bird calls at the beginning (starting about 9 seconds in) are clear and distinct, but not piercingly loud. Then let the piece play and forget about it. If your attention is attracted to it, notice it for however long, and when your attention slips away as it will, let it. If you want to let the piece play on a loop as a kind of sonic wallpaper, that’s good too. Whatever you do with this, don’t let listening to it become a chore. We have enough demands to deal with already. This piece, I hope, can occupy your space with you, making no demands, taking care of itself and in some way improving the passing moments.

Ordinary Time

Imagine that a movie is playing in the next room and you are hearing the soundtrack . . . 
The title refers to Yoko Ono's instructions, in "Grapefruit," to "capture moonlight on water in a bucket."
Sounds from O'Fallon, Illinois; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Prince Edward Island, Canada; and other locations. The street musicians were recorded in Harvard Square. 

Moonlight in a Bucket

Sound recorded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California. The matrix of the piece is a walk, a journey. The essence of it, perhaps, is the shifting and focusing of attention, the mind reaching for meaning at each moment, creating an order or letting go of one, watching itself attend as something rises above or sinks below the threshold of being perceivable. There is never just one thing in your field of attention, or in your mind, or in your space. There is never true silence, but there is sometimes quiet. Attention is also creation; the mind latches onto what it's hearing and tries to complete it.

Other Places, Other Days

Soundpiece made up of ambient sounds in Cambridge, Massachusetts: early morning sounds around dawn, and Harvard Square on a Saturday in May. Ambitious first effort to create an original piece using Audacity.

boundary

Over twenty years ago, a student of mine wrote: "End the end so the beginning can begin." These words seemed to sum up our situation then, and they feel even more pointedly applicable now. Whether a new world can be born out of the ruins of the old is far from clear today, but the urgency of the situation is beyond doubt. Indirectly, that's what this soundpiece is trying to evoke.

Wallace Stevens said, in "The Necessary Angel," that there is "a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation." That is the spirit of this piece: a sort of hand-to-hand combat for the preservation of the inner life, against ever more powerful, insidious forces that seek to crush it.

Till The Ending Ends

An abstract soundpiece about the way it feels right now, October 2020. The sense that something big, probably cataclysmic, is coming; we don't know exactly what or when, but it's coming.

Days Before the Wreck

This piece is my first effort at a response to the events of January 6, 2021. The principal voice you hear speaking is that of Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, in excerpts from a video she made for her constituents on Jan. 12. I happened to find this video linked to an article in the Washington Post, and it inspired me to make use of it in a soundpiece trying to capture some of the feeling of this time. 

Other sound comes from news reports on the riot at the Capitol. 

Music: "In My Solitude," played by Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach, from the LP "Money Jungle."

This Line Has Been Drawn

I'm a writer, and for over 40 years was a teacher of literature and creative writing. Since 2012 I have been making soundpieces (or sound poems), as well as word/sound/image artworks. You can find, experience, and download my work by following the links below.

lpei