A collection of phone recordings of harp improvisations for meditative purposes, remixed and rearranged to push the boundaries of harp music.

Tracklist:

Sunshowers
Walking
Stampede
Aurora
Dusk
Fire
Frost
Gold
Comets/Stardust
Eclipse



[Audio description]
1. Sunshowers

Multicolored textures swirl in a repetitive daze, changing moods two times before dissapating


2. Walking

Ambling fingerpicking backed by appearances and disappearances of overtones blanketing the sound

3. Stampede

Rush of beating and clapping leading to ecstactic polyrhythmic circling

4. Aurora

Dusty counterrhythms crashing and shifting tones while leaving shadows of sound, before final melodic transformation toward brightness

5. Dusk

Echoing steps climbing into atmospheric fragments of sounds before colliding into rolling buildup and final explosion

6. Fire

Multioctave rhythmic playing leading to reversal

7. Frost

Cascading call and response of glittery, lightly plucked dustings. Intense storm of scratchy sound

8. Gold

Cycles of rising and remaining before fading away

9. Comets/Sundust

Unyielding pressure playing with how much to let go

10. Eclipse

Inversed beginnings with variations

Permanently Transient

For choir and obbligato improviser; 
text from Lamentations 1:12 and "The Cry" by Denise Levertov, with permissions from New Directions Publishing

Commissioned & premiered by Khorikos with Charlotte Greve (alto saxophone), November 12, 2023, Shrine Church of St. Anthony of Padua, NYC.

The first line of Lamentations 1:12 is a question in the original Hebrew: “Is it nothing to you?” This is missed in the vulgate Latin translation into the widely spread "O vos omnes", but the question is more pertinent. Not only a call for help or pity, but implicitly a warning. Matthew Henry’s 1710 commentary puts it concisely: "Jerusalem sitting dejected on the ground calls on those that passed by to consider whether her example did not concern them. Her outward sufferings were great but her inward sufferings were harder to bear through the sense of guilt. Sorrow for sin must be great sorrow and must affect the soul.” Our sorrows now are certainly “great”, especially oriented towards a future whose imagination is inextricable from the specter of a more total destruction than ever before. Hence Denise Levertov’s poem, “The Cry,” which gives voice to that inward suffering through the very impossibility: “Nothing for eloquence / no rhetoric / fits / that unrendering” — paradoxically, it only made sense to try and work through this nothing, to sing in its face with the old and new words, to know your NOW only through what it could be, and choose accordingly with the ineffable escape route of sounds: the bird, the child, the choir, the saxophone. These real and poetic things, and the very efficacy of how they articulate themselves, are constantly shifting around uneasily over the course of this piece.

Is It Nothing

Harp Solo (2023)

Song about traveling to Italy.
Played on acoustic guitar.

Travel Log (Italia #10)

Lyrics:

It was all my fault
For going down on you
In the interview
In my mind

Oh she couldn't get belief
The old pope sent your mamma to hell
Now she's in the basement
Thankful for the relief

I’d gladly die for her
We will form a team
Holding hands together
Climbing a ladder of our dreams
All the way
to you, my love

The new pope is on our side
He can help the poor
Wearing bishop's robes
Continuing opium war

Let's wait for tomorrow
What happens will be best

With her with you
With her with you
With her with you
With her with you
With her with you
With her with you
With her with you
With her with you
With her with you
With her with you
With her with you
With her with you

Permanently Transient

TJ Moaton

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