Episode 189: Blackness

This one started on the actual piano. I plucked out a chord progression in F major, sitting at the real instrument, and then carried it into the studio to make it slow and distant. Thirty-two beats a minute with the grid switched off, which is slow enough that it stops being a tempo and turns into weather. Moody and introverted, and I mean that about the playing, not about me.

It is part of a meditation I have been having about hibernating through the Florida heat. Some biological sluggishness has had hold of me all summer — the sleep comes at strange hours and in strange amounts, and the days go by at about the speed this record goes by. I was not trying to describe that. It just turned out to be what was under my hands.

The piano is the whole record; everything else is underneath it. Several soundscapes, all of them made out of voices — choir phrases, vocalise, a vocoder — none of them singing anything, just breathing under the chords. Then the rooms, which are enormous. One of the reverbs is an eighteen-and-a-half-second castle lobby. That is what makes the picture dark, and that is where the title came from.

Here is the part I did not expect. I played F major. The record reads A minor. Nothing changed the notes — a tail that long smears every chord into the one after it until the tonic is no longer the loudest thing in the room, and what survives is the darker reading of the same handful of pitches. The room transposed it. Blackness is not a mood I applied afterward; it is what the reverb left standing.

It moves more than something this slow has any right to. A minor at the top, six minutes over in C, back to A minor for a long stretch, a strange bright turn into D major around sixteen, and then A minor again from twenty to twenty-six, sitting there getting more certain of itself. And then the last two minutes go out in C major. A record called Blackness that finds the door on the way out. I did not plan that either, and I am not going to fix it.

Nothing borrowed on this one. Five tracks, no loops, nothing recorded in from outside — just the piano, the voices, and the rooms. Twenty-nine minutes and fifty-six seconds, and it stops four seconds short of the half hour, which feels about right for a thing that never quite wakes up.