Dark Lake Bright Sky: A Meditation on Discord and Light

This piece emerges from a very short fragment of audio from the contemporary ritual of a Threshold choir offering. Informed by the microtonal experiments of Curtis Roads et al, the piece extends a finite moment of time into a continuously unfolding space, bringing into question the seemingly liminal line between living and not. The journey into death is no longer a binary here, and is instead offered as a decentering of the self — a kind of return — through a process that is universal and strange, both dreadful and peaceful at once.

The piece is composed from field recordings made at precious places.  Birdsong recorded outside an estranged relative’s flat shortly after they died, ambient sounds from mountains in Transylvania, Threshold choral singing, and recordings gathered from a lake in Slovenia in the dead of night.