Testing a modular performance setup. The sequenced synth voices are from DPO--the lead is ALM's MCO through the Doepfer SEM filter.

The phaser effect is QPAS in Smile Pass mode, with the Radiate control being modulated by an LFO

0102 Sketch

My friend Claire wrote a poem that I kinda fell in love with, so I decided to record a reading of it and put it to music.

Performance and music is by me, Poem by Claire Thorne

Full Text:
Dear Icarus,

When you died
it was like you in a car as a child—
face pressed against the back window,
cruel tyrant in the front seat
with a gentle and arrogant smile,
not listening
and too willing to tell us:
“You’ll understand when you’re older.”

I used to chase the dawn with you.
we dropped sunbeams on our tongues,
saw like prisms see,
existed in infinite states all at once,
both waves and particles
and all the madness between,
never catching the Sun,
but being victorious for the moment
As though we had.

I want those fucking days back!
I want a coup d’etat!
I want the tyrant
that's in the front seat,
that's in the cities we sleep in,
that's in the maddening silences
and all those conversations
that will never be anything now but letters,
stamped and mailed to the void—
I want that tyrant deposed
and no funeral held.
I want to go back to pretending
that touching a sun
ends in anything 
but loss.

And I want you back too.

Icarus,
I didn’t know that you’d fashioned
hypodermic wings
strung together on wax veins,
fueled by desperation and awe.
And I didn’t see your ascents,
not a single one,
not once.
But, Icarus, if I had
would I have stopped you or would I have followed?

I’m told you fell in tasteful silence,
not a single cloud was disturbed.
We went on
too lost in our foreboding
too fixated on being storms
too busy making thunder
in the skies over Crete
to notice at all
as you fell like rain.

ohnoabear

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