Like all artists who have been working through and processing life during a global pandemic it can be difficult not to take one’s situation into account when creating. While I did not actively set out to write an “isolation” or “pandemic” piece of music I was, for some reason, drawn toward the idea of being lost at sea, a feeling many are probably experiencing at a time like this. Not in a life-threatening, panicked sense, but in a more mysterious, foggy, or even calming way of feeling. A sense of letting go, of floating, but not knowing where you are, like a child who closes her eyes while swinging high on a playground swing. I suppose as with much of my music I was after the balance on that line of fragility between the insecure and the comforting.
I have spent a lot of time in my life in a canoe, on lakes and rivers. In the very early fog-covered mornings, or the dusks of evening searching for a place to camp for the night. Canoes are peculiar vessels. A way of traveling solo or with only one or two others into hidden areas not often seen from land. They are very sensitive to balance and weight distribution. Standing up in a canoe is not always recommended.
It is these characteristics of the canoe that influenced this piece of music. Something with which I am deeply familiar yet still teetering on the unknown, and, literally, attempting to keep balance. With “Canoe” I hope to instil a sense of solitude, loneliness, and the hushed searching for and unknown something, just out of reach.
Despite recorded music (generally) being a finite format; one with set beginnings and endings, I enjoy recordings in which these points are blurred, or have little meaning. I am fascinated most by music which is less about linear, horizontal movement and more about placing the listener into an environment simply where they exist to find their own path in or out.
wallofambient 