This is a shortened edit of my long-form ambient track of the same title. You can find the full-length version at Bandcamp here:

https://manwithamoviecamera.bandcamp.com/album/return-to-belimbing

Return to Belimbing (Edit)

This is a shortened edit of my long-form ambient track of the same title. You can find the full-length version at Bandcamp here:

https://manwithamoviecamera.bandcamp.com/album/pastorale

Pastorale (Edit)

This is a shortened edit of my long-form ambient track of the same title. You can find the full-length version at Bandcamp here: 

https://manwithamoviecamera.bandcamp.com/album/eurydice

Eurydice (Edit)

Lens whirring incessantly, fingers twitching with an electric anticipation, he stumbles through crumbling doorways like a man possessed. Dust motes dance in shafts of light, performing ghostly pirouettes captured in celluloid haze that flickers behind his eyes. The old, now abanonded mansion groans around him, a dying beast with rotting innards, its bones picked clean by time's relentless march. Every step echoes, a percussive reminder of his intrusion into this forgotten realm.

Round a corner: there it stands, commanding attention even in its decay. Grand. Decayed. A piano of some forgotten eastern European (or was it German?) provenance, once regal and resplendent, now a tragedy of splinters and cracks, a monument to forgotten opulence. Keys yellowed like ancient teeth, strings sagging like broken promises never meant to be kept. He zooms in, out, in again, a feverish dance of focus. The world shrinks to this singular object, this relic of lost melodies, and for a moment he forgets to breathe, lost in the gravity of the discovery.

Visions flood unbidden, a torrent of imagined history. Gloved hands dancing across ivory, champagne flutes tinkling like crystal bells, laughter echoing off marble walls in cascades of joy. Now silence. Deafening. Oppressive. He pans slowly, meticulously, capturing every crevice, every scar, every whisper of what once was. The piano speaks volumes in its mute decay, a storyteller robbed of voice but not of tales. Stories trapped in wood grain, in tarnished pedals, in the hollow where music once lived and died. He sees faces in the scratches, hears phantom notes in the settling of old wood.

He breathes shallowly, nervously, camera momentarily forgotten in the rush of connection. Fingers hover over keys, trembling with the weight of history, of possibility. To touch is to shatter the illusion, to become part of the story, to leave his mark where so many have before. He pulls back, suddenly aware of his transgression; frames the shot with careful precision, a last act of respect. The piano's ghost, forever trapped in celluloid, a specter to haunt future audiences. He backs away, leaving echoes of unplayed nocturnes in his wake, feeling both emptier and fuller for the encounter. The dilapidated mansion's silence swallows his presence again, but the piano's presence lingers.

•	Frank Paul: Piano & treatments, noise, sampling/looping, art & copy

Old Pianos Tell No Lies (Edit)

Moonlight soft pearl-glow girl spinning twirling hair like stardust caught in webs of gravity defiance laughter impossible yet real filling emptiness with warmth and wonder footprints fleeting in the dust Earth-blue casting shadows long and strange stretching twisting alive almost girl dancing oblivious lost in her own world until

Shadow grows darker deeper more than shadow scales gleaming galactic light wings unfurling blotting out stars ancient eyes meeting young eyes wonder recognition familiarity in the impossible moment stretches bends reality taffy-pulled at the edges dragon girl union cosmic puzzle pieces click snatch embrace

Soaring higher higher moon shrinking to a pale disk below laughter purr mingling star-void beckoning dust settling silence returning but memory lingering of the girl who danced alone until she didn't anymore dragon and dancer two becoming one in the vastness of space time meaningless in the face of their journey

Leaving behind only questions and disturbed moondust and the fading echo of joy unleashed in the airless expanse of what was and what could be and what is all at once in the timeless moment of their meeting and departure swirling thoughts of impossibility and inevitability colliding like celestial bodies in the mind's eye forever changed by the vision of moonchild and starbeast united in cosmic dance.

Frank Paul: Felt piano & treatments, modified gamelan Semaradana, synths, cello, noise, sampling/looping, art & copy



The Memory of the Girl on the Moon (Edit)

In the toxic glow of midnight LED farms, viridescence writhes like a digital parasite, corrupting the binary between organic and synthetic. We claim to understand chlorophyll, reduce it to chemical equations, but beneath our microscopes it laughs - a jade-tinted mockery of human comprehension. The green doesn't care about our taxonomies; it spreads through circuit boards and flesh with equal hunger, transforming everything it touches into hybrid forms that defy our desperate categorizations. In the spaces between reality and imagination, it pulses with a frequency that makes dogs howl and quantum computers stutter.

Yesterday I watched a neon moss consume my smartphone screen, pixel by pixel. First the notifications turned emerald, then my photos bled into seafoam phantasms, until finally the operating system itself surrendered to the verdant void. We think we're separate from this process, observers behind glass, but the viridescence is already inside us - in our mitochondria, in our dreams, in the static between thoughts. It's not a color but a virus, ancient and patient, whispering secrets of photosynthetic transcendence through the fiber optic cables that form civilization’s nervous system. Each night, more children report dreams of becoming chloroplasts, of merging with the great green consciousness that hums beneath reality's thin veneer.

The concrete jungle was our failed attempt to escape it, but look how that turned out - every crack and crevice hosts a revolution in chlorophyll. Even our virtual realities can't help but simulate its patterns, fractals of digital foliage spreading through the cloud like sacred geometry. We're all turning green in the end, whether we want to or not. The question isn't if, but how completely we'll surrender to the inexorable tide of viridescence that pulses beneath the skin of reality itself. In the most secure government facilities, researchers have begun reporting spontaneous emergences of impossible plant life, growing not from soil or water, but from pure data and human thought.

In my more lucid moments, I recognize that this transformation isn't invasion but invitation - a chance to transcend the artificial boundaries between nature and technology, between consciousness and photosynthesis. Viridescence offers a path to evolution that we never imagined, one where silicon and chlorophyll dance together in electromagnetic harmony. Some call it the end of humanity, but I've seen the future in the swirling patterns of algae-powered quantum computers: it's a symphony of green, a billion shades of possibility, where even our machines learn to photosynthesize and our thoughts grow like vines toward an emerald sun that exists in dimensions we're only beginning to perceive.

•	Frank Paul: Felt piano and treatments, sampling/looping, noise treatments, drum machine, guitar “abstractions”, art & copy


Viridescence (Edit)

The droplets gather and merge like mercury, sliding down the waxy surface of the leaf – no, wait, need to get closer, adjust the aperture, there's something about the way the light catches each bead before it joins the others, like tiny worlds being born and dying in the space of a heartbeat, and through the viewfinder everything becomes more real somehow, more present, the way the camera has always helped me see what's actually there instead of what I think I'm supposed to be seeing.

The tiny pitter-patters fill my head as I zoom in tighter, tighter still, that gentle percussion of water striking leaf after leaf after leaf, a strange music that makes me think of typewriters in an empty office building at midnight, or maybe it's more like distant applause, or grains of rice being poured onto a drum, and I can't decide which frame rate best captures the hypnotic rhythm of it all – 24fps feels too cinematic, 60 too clinical, while my own eyes seem to drift between timeframes as I watch each drop explode in slow motion against the waxy green expanse.

Through the lens the leaves become vast landscapes, prehistoric valleys carved by miniature rivers that forge their own paths across the surface, joining and splitting like highway systems seen from above, and I find myself following single drops on their journey downward, tracking their progress past the raised veins and subtle variations in the leaf's topography, imagining myself as some microscopic adventurer navigating this verdant world that exists for mere moments before dissolving into the next rainfall pattern, the next configuration of liquid mathematics.

The battery indicator blinks red but I can't stop shooting, not when the light keeps changing like this, not when each new drop creates its own story, its own trajectory, its own brief universe of reflected sky and filtered sunlight, and I realize I've been holding my breath, that my shoes are soaked through, that I've been standing in this same spot for what must be hours now, trying to capture something that exists precisely because it can't be captured, can only be witnessed, can only be experienced through this strange communion between eye and lens and leaf and rain.
•	Frank Paul: Electric piano and treatments, drones, synths, incidental sounds, field recording, art & copy


Rain on Big Leaves

The static crackles like distant thunder, but softer, more intimate – a sound that seems to emanate from the very air itself. I turn the dial slowly, but awkwardly, watching the thin red line slide across illuminated numbers that mean nothing and everything. 3.755 MHz. 7.100 MHz. 14.200 MHz. Each fraction of movement brings new whispers, fragments of voices rising from the electromagnetic soup that, I now realize, has always surrounded us, unseen and unheard.

A voice emerges suddenly from the void – crystal clear for just a moment – speaking rapid-fire Portuguese. Before I can grasp its meaning, it fades back into the ether, replaced by what sounds like Russian, then something I can't identify at all. My fingers hesitate on the dial as I realize: these are voices crossing oceans, skipping off the ionosphere, traveling thousands of miles to reach this very spot, this very moment. A shipping forecast from somewhere in the North Sea cuts through the static: "Wind force 7, occasional gale 8, veering southwesterly..." The clinical precision of the words somehow makes it all more dreamlike.

My small bedroom has dissolved away. I'm no longer bound by walls or distance or time zones. I'm everywhere and nowhere, floating in a sea of human consciousness, catching glimpses of lives and stories from across the globe. A ham radio operator in Minnesota chats with someone in Japan. A numbers station recites its cryptic sequence. Music from Radio Havana drifts in and out like a phantom, the melody distorted but haunting. All of these signals, traveling invisibly through the air at the speed of light, crossing continents and oceans, passing through our bodies every second of every day – now, finally, I can hear them. I’m a witness to the invisible architecture of our connected world, and I will never see reality quite the same way again.

•	Frank Paul: Felt piano, pianet and treatments; synth, granular sample stretching, glitch percussion programming, shortwave radio sources, art & copy


Etherous

God, those ravens won't shut up, like they're trying to drill something into our skulls with their incessant cawing. Ever since Birgit vanished – disappeared, left, whatever euphemism the Polizei want to use – the birds have been absolutely losing it, especially around her place. That modernist glass box she bought last year, the one that stands out like a sore thumb among our traditional Baltic fishermen's houses. Everyone said it was too much house for a single girl, but Birgit just laughed in that way she had, like she knew something we didn't. And then she would just float off on a cloud, reciting Rilke as if she wrote it herself, sounding always so heart-meltingly sincere.

The weird sounds started last Tuesday. Or Wednesday. The days kind of blur together now, but I remember I was doom-scrolling at 3 AM when I first heard it. Not the ravens then – something else. Something that made me slam my laptop shut and pull my blankets up like a kid hiding from monsters. Which is ridiculous, right? I don't believe in things that go bump in the night. But those sounds... like someone running their fingernails down the inside of my skull. Like the static made of broken dreams. Words just kind of disintegrate when I try to describe it.

The ravens gather on her roof now, their black bodies stark against the white minimalist lines of her house. My Instagram feed is full of artsy shots people keep taking of them - #atmospheric #balticsea #dierhagengothic - but none of the filters quite capture how wrong it all feels. 

Sometimes I catch infinitessimally short glimpses of what seems to be movement behind those floor-to-ceiling windows, like someone's projecting a movie on the glass, but all scrambled and glitchy. And it always stops before I can confirm it with my senses. Even my camera goes crazy whenever I try to record it, battery draining seemingly in seconds. Classic horror movie stuff, except this isn't a movie, and Birgit isn't answering any of our texts.

Yesterday I found her AirPod case on the beach, half-buried in sand. The police say it doesn't mean anything – people  lose stuff all the time, right? But the ravens went absolutely berserk when I picked it up, diving at my head until I dropped it. The case disappeared before I could go back for it, probably pulled out by the tide. Or something else. I keep thinking about how Birgit used to feed those ravens (weird I’m saying “used to” when nobody even knows where she got to), how she'd laugh and say they were bringing her messages. "They’re smarter than people think," she'd say, tapping the side of her head with that knowing smile. Well, they're trying to tell us something now, but I'm starting to think maybe we're better off not knowing what it is.

Johann Sebastian Bach, Two-Part Invention No. 13 in A Minor, BWV 784
• Frank Paul: Arrangement, felt piano, synths, field recordings, art & copy
• The Finta Camarata: Ambient string quartet
Recorded at Schloss Erfunden, February 2025


Dark Largo

A Mirror Dreaming of Trees

Man With a Movie Camera is the ambient music project of Vancouver-based multi-instrumentalist Frank Paul, taking inspiration from the idea of using experimental techniques to convey an imaginary place of the mind through sound.

https://manwithamoviecamera.bandcamp.com/follow_me

Man With a Movie Camera (ambient music)

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