Monday, September 15, 2014

5.) Deer Creek

Deer Creek runs through Dream Acres, a coop organic farm outside of Wykoff, MN that my brother and his family live on.  I love visiting there because it's such a contrast to my surroundings in Brooklyn.  And of course I love spending time with his family.  I was there for about 5 days at the end of August, and one morning I wandered back to the creek with my camera.  I've always loved water.  As a kid I swam nearly every day in the summertime, and I'm pretty much obsessed with the ocean.  This video has very little action, aside from the static movement of the creek.  But I think it's a nice meditation.  The moving water is constant, yet no two moments are alike.  I think the reflections in the water are particularly interesting.  I'm looking forward to watching it in a few months, just to remember that it's not always cold and not everywhere is New York City.

The music for this piece was composed while vacuuming.  When Akiko and I go to Philadelphia for the macrobiotic study course that we're doing this year, we finish the weekend by helping the staff clean the place.  For the August session I went straight for the vacuum cleaner, which I often do.  It's nice to push a vacuum cleaner around after listening to lectures and eating delicious food all weekend.  Anyway, the vacuum cleaner there hums an A-flat, and I found myself singing and working out this melody as I cleaned.  It was a nice moment.  When I was finished vacuuming, I recorded a voice memo so I wouldn't forget the melody.  After checking out the Deer Creek footage, I thought Vacuum Song would be nice for the meditative vibe.  I was playing around with panning and reverb, trying to create the illusion that the piano was being played in the farm house which was about 100 yards away from the creek, but it just wasn't sounding good.  It sounded like a cathedral, not a hay field next to the woods.  But I did purposely put the music low in the mix so that the sounds of the water were not covered up.