Penultimate section of the performance -- the first of three flutes (three appears repeatedly in the work and probably most audibly here) -- the Big Bear introduces the "mourning" section: beefy earthy wooden cedar flute that here represents a mythology of the land animals left to mourn. I leave the monome playing a simple three note triad three chord sequence with very slow (10 second) ADSR filters on a sample of a string "trio" made up of my Bass (playing Arco) -- on this, live, I play Pizzicato.

I was quite hemmed in with chord choices because the flutes are pentatonic but the chords were found in the normal (Heptatonic) major minor scale. Penta chords were too primitive sounding so I did stretch a bit but keeping it simple avoided dissonances .

Structurally the chord triads makes use of D-maj7 (D flute - "Earth/Land Animals"), a different D flute which is two octaves above the first flute... B-maj "Salmon" -- representing the sea-creatures and the (F♯ flute "Humans" -- incidentally the 7th root, F♯ in B-maj) and B-min -- that B-maj/B-min transition *really* makes my neck hair stand up on end.

Why B-min? Well, two reasons. In baroque music, (I've been listening to a lot of while recovering from the medications that nearly threw me off the chase this year), B-min was often associated with suffering, it's been associated with quiet acceptance of fate. It also resolves the relative major (D-maj-7) that I start with. In a B-min triad inversion, B's Minor Third is a D plus B's perfect fifth happens to be F♯ so you get very nice chord changes for long and slow overlapping ADSR sequences. It needed to be chords that were very easy to fade in and out and that the flutes can weave around. Mixing electronics and purely primitive analog instrumentation with wildly different timbres and scales can be tricky.

All this came in my analysis afterwards but when writing was just going by ear so all context comes "after the fact". I ain't that calculating.

The flutes are bathed in a hybrid impulse response of three sites along the migration path using Space Designer.

Whereas the other sections are fairly loose and only happen when I fade in a section or play the drum pads, the whole thing is very very tightly timed to the sequencer here each flute gets 25 seconds (I lose all attempt at time signatures here -- it's just too fluid) with a 10 second pause between each to change flutes and my cue to play is a sort-of deep clanking dropping down a well sound in a loop. In the background is wind recording from the autumn gales we get here -- but its been spacially widened to give it a huge soundstage. The Logic chain I made to achieve this I have called the "Bleak-o-tron"... aka the "Doom-o-Matic".

A HQ recording is here (Poor) Video footage is here