Name: Arials by Thomas Ortiz 4
Duration: 4 min 2 s
Description: My favorite System of a Down song. Finally used my ESP V to record something :)

Using Soft Kitty from The Big Bang Theory, I've added verses, voices and music.

Soft Kitty

Data from the European Space Agency and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has captured the dynamic movement of the Sun’s atmosphere for over 20 years. Today, we can hear the Sun’s movement — all of its waves, loops and eruptions — with our own ears.

This story incorporates data sonified by the Stanford Experimental Physics Lab and music from Lee Rosevere.

10 Minute Meditations

Flow

Sounds of the Sun

“Anxiety”, explores doubt. Doubt that came as the result of investing myself for years in a system that gave him nothing in return but anxiety.

Anxiety - Single

Anxiety

My favorite System of a Down song. Finally used my ESP V to record something :)

Arials

Today, December 1, 2020, marks the creation of a project I've had in mind for a long while now. I have never been fond of having my picture taken, which I realize has the downside of not leaving a photographic record of myself for my sons whenever I should shuffle off stage. However, music is a huge part of my life, from childhood and forward. My mother's family (familia Rivera!) are all musical and I grew up surrounded by a wide range of genres and influences. Perhaps the most important to me are the songs from childhood and up throughout the decades that I've sang for my sons, from the birth of my eldest the year my mama died and right on through to the present. Three sons, 14+ years of singing to them.
Over the next however-long-it-takes I'll be posting links to recordings of these songs. The recordings are low quality: No frills, no muss, no fuss. Just me, singing the songs I want my sons to remember and be able to listen to for decades to come. So there will be crackles and cracks and the distant (or near) sound of kids and a husband and two dogs and life. At first I hoped to record in a controlled environment with some attempt at editing and I may do that occasionally. But in the close-quarters of 2020 letting go of the idea of perfectionism works best.

Today's song is a recording of me singing "Not In Notthingham" from Disney's 1973 animated film "Robin Hood" followed by "My Own Home (The Jungle Book Theme)" from Disney's "The Jungle Book" 1967. I own no rights, obviously.

Nottingham - My Own Home

One of my greatest regrets is that I don't have a recording of my mother, myself and my titi's singing El Niño Tambor during las navidades with family. 
It remains one of my absolute favorite carols and I sing it quite a bit to the boys and around the house during this time of year. I went ahead and put together a bit of a mix here: I'm singing the melody and the two harmonies that we would typically use those years ago when I got to sing it with Mama. It's just some low-quality fiddling with Audacity, but it does the trick. 
Eli, Siah and Solo: I wish you could have heard your grandmother Abigail sing this to you - she did it best. 

The Little Drummer Boy (Carol of the Drum) was written by  Katherine Kennicott Davis. I own no rights, etc.

Niño Tambor

After a bit of an unexpected break, I've finally managed to record again! It's slapdash but it will do ^.^ 

I am a Natalie Merchant fan and have been for decades. Her music are some of my go-to favorites for all types of moods. I admire her work greatly, so little wonder her songs have wound their way into my lullabies and any-reason-why-not singing. She covers a variety of folksongs and poetry with her music: Her albulm "Leave Your Sleep" is in many ways an inspiration for this project of mine. As a mother, Natalie Merchant enjoyed finding and reading poems for her daughter. Eventually she put those poems to music and performs them brilliantly, as a soloist or with guest musicians. Years ago, when I first listened to these songs and fell in love all over again, it planted that little thought "Wouldn't it be good to preserve rituals and art like this for my own boys?" 

I've combined one of Merchant's songs from "Leave Your Sleep" - If No One Ever Marries Me - with another song she covered "Bury Me Underneath the Willow" which is an Appalachian folksong originally recorded by the Carter family in the 1920s. 

Folksongs are a mixed bag of sounds and stories, many of them with rather dubious messages: Some of them are downright haunting, depressing or disturbing! But rather like my love for fairytales, folklore and mythos, I've always been drawn to these very human songs that are so often deceptively simple in music and lyrics but can speak volumes about a mood, an event, a thought, a custom. Just please bear in mind that the subject matter doesn't necessarily have my approval! Bury Me Underneath the Willow is what we'd probably call "problematic" these days and with little wonder: The singer is asking to be buried in a place where she might be found and perhaps mourned by her fickle fiancé who jilts her on her wedding day. My boys (and everyone else): Never give into the kind of despair this song speaks of. You are each of you worth so much more. 

That being said: Heartache is real and often feels unbearable in the moment. That's what this song portrays: Loss and betrayal and the emotions that go with it. In that sense, I think it is beautiful. And, well, I just love the way it sounds. 

Natalie Merchant covered the folksong in her albulm "The House Carpenter's Daughter" (2001)

Now the poem that inspired Merchant's If No One Ever Marries Me has my full approval. In a recording of a live performance by Merchant, she introduces the song with a brief accounting of the poet. Laurence Alma-Tadema was an English novelist and poet, born in Brussels in 1865, the eldest daughter of the Dutch painter, Lawrence Alma-Tadema (see what they did there?). She wrote the poem from the perspective of herself as a child, deciding what she would do if no one ever married her. After all,  the girl reasons, her nurse 'says I'm not pretty' and she knows she is 'seldom good.' There is such a wonderful cheeky realism here. She accepts that people believe these things but doesn't seem to feel especially bad about it. Instead she goes on to list the ways she'll very happily live a single woman. It's all the more impressive given the era. I also love how Alma-Tadema captures the narrow view of age children tend to have: The subject reasons she'll go ahead and "buy myself a little orphan girl" to raise as her own when shes gotten "really old" - about 28 or 29. I love it!
 
Incidentally, Laurence died in 1940, in London. And, yes: She never married.

----
No One Ever Marries Me (Poem by Laurence Alma-Tadema (1897), Music by Natalie Merchant (2010))
Bury Me Underneath the Willow (A.P. Carter, Peer International Corp. 1928)
I own no rights to these songs, etc etc etc.

Arials

Thomas Ortiz 4

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