Totem Electric

If life is pain, and suffering is unaccepted pain, then sorrow is the trace of suffering remembered. While universal, I can’t escape the impression that as it is a feeling so deeply private, it is perhaps entirely unsharable. I want to learn to hold this sorrow, to accept it fully: to find the beauty in it, a bittersweetness. Despite painful memories, despite everything. 

This was not something I intended to do in a musical work: simply, the instrument cried as I turned it on, and I found that resonating in my current moment. I externalize this feeling on to the instrument, and slow it down, to study it, to feel its micro-undulations.

It is a slow motion cry, unfolding in the air with traces of anger, melancholy, and hints of beauty, for what seems like a long brief moment.