0:00 - Bridge & Creek | Thunder & Rain
8:40 - Anniversary Leaves, I.
14:30 - Anniversary Leaves, II.
22:50 - Weather Forecast
31:30 - Anniversary Leaves, III.

Anniversary Leaves is a compilation of field recordings consisting primarily of thunderstorms, wind moving through trees, and vehicles passing over a bridge. The primary underlying recording - which comes in and out of focus throughout "Anniversary Leaves" - was recorded in the late night of my 6th anniversary with my partner, Ida in the anticipation of an oncoming storm (which ultimately never arrived). We were surrounded by trees which were shaken continuously by the heavy winds. Layered onto this recording are many other recordings of leaves put in motion by wind, as well as a small number of other captured sounds and a handful of performed sounds.

Bridge & Creek | Thunder & Rain juxtaposes creek against rain and thunder against the passing of cars from an overhead bridge. Bridge & Creek was recorded in Knoxville, Tennessee's Tyson park under Tyson McGhee Park St bridge, which Third Creek runs under. Thunder & Rain consists of thunderstorms recorded in both Tennessee and Kansas. This work fades between the two; the falling of rain pairs with the running water of Third Creek while thunder pairs with the vehicles passing overhead.

Anniversary Leaves (full album)

(1992-96, revised 1998) for solo vibraphone, crotales, steel pan, flexatone, and gong 

Abglanzbeladen/auseinandergeschrieben (laden with reflections/written asunder) is the first solo in Barrett’s Opening of the Mouth, an evening length work consisting of eleven pieces for solo, duo, trio, and large ensemble that overlap one another. Opening of the Mouth refers to an ancient Egyptian ritual performed during the process of mummification in order to restore the power of speech, enabling the individual to plead their case before the judges of the underworld. The predominant text in Opening of the Mouth is from “Engführung” (1958) by Paul Celan, from which the vibraphone solo also receives its title. As Barrett explains: 

The mouth of poet Paul Celan was opened by the Holocaust; his complex constellations of images indeed include that of giving a voice to the dead, to those whose mouths were empty before being closed, the countless and the nameless. Celan’s language itself is a language beyond destruction of the German language by the Nazis, the ‘thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech’ in Celan’s own words, its ‘bearing witness’ also a witness to its own impossibility as, between 1945 and 1970 (the year of Celan’s suicide by drowning), the poems are distilled from lyric utterances to hard and opaque fragments: concretions of a need and an inability to articulate something which is both more and less 
than memory. The millions of people murdered and burned have been distributed throughout the atmosphere which enters and leaves our lungs. - Richard Barrett

Verbacht ins 
Gelände 
mit der untrüglichen Spur: 
Gras, auseinandergeschrieben 
”Engführung” (1958), Paul Celan (1920-1970) 

Removed to the 
Terrain 
with unerring track: 
grass, written asunder 
translation, Richard Barrett

Abglanzbeladen / auseinandergeschrieben ― Richard Barrett

now that the interior surrounds us
the most practiced of distances, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
enormous
no longer habitable

Sean Dowgray

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