01|19|08   More on Scattering the Sun Like Gunshot

A photo of the setting sun refracting through the braches of a tree. The ground is covered by snow. The scene is serene.

Ok, I admit it: I have google alerts out on everything under the sun relating to the enright house. So, for better or for worse, that means I catch a reasonable percentage of online mentions – in this case of our video.

Since releasing the video to Scattering the Sun a few days ago, one thing has definately suprised me: a fair bit of the coverage (which, thus far, has been slow, but positive) has been coming not from New Zealand, not from the US, but instead from Germany.

Take for example this lovely write-up, translated from the German blog The Last Pop Song:

That New Zealand is a very beautiful country, is something we have known, at the very latest, since Lord of the Rings. That New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates, too, is known. Therefore, it’s quite likely that New Zealand ought to be harboring a lot of melancholy young people, as well. And that magnitude and eminence frequently stimulates musical sensitivity and the form of expression, is also a well-known fact since Sigur Ros, at the very latest. Ergo, it is not far fetched to assume that there must also exist some magnificent, melancholic music in New Zealand. (Man, are we logical today). And here it is: The Enright House play a wonderfully ethereal, elegiacal and electrifying Postrock that captured our romantic indie-heart in a storm. (…) The videos on the band’s website are of equal aesthetic magnitude. Absolutely recommended!

Most excitingly, a lot of this small wave of German blog coverage [i.e. Coast is Clear and Soundmag.de] was either directly brought on by the recommendation of one single person who liked our music enough to tell his friends, or by the simple snowball effect that his initial recommendations had.

See, for someone like myself, who has to do virtually everything by myself (writing music, recording, manufacture, design, website, social networking, internet promotion, organizing gigs, correspondance, finding musicians to help bring this music to life, and so on), the simplest help, the simplest gesture of support, can make my life as a musician so much more worthwhile.

It’s hard to explain, but when other human beings support something you have created, something you have invested your life in, it changes you. It makes me more humble, more joyous, and more motivated.

So, to everyone who has ever helped me and the band out: thank you. Your generous help is, and always be, humbly received and appreciated.

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01|14|08   New video: Scattering the sun like gunshot

Still image from the video to Scattering the Sun Like Gunshot

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11|01|07   I never thought I’d see this

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10|30|07   Stillness, poetry and music

Mary Jones.

Mary is generally very good at living. She is highly intelligent, well-educated, and enviably successful at making sound and moral decisions in her life. She also happens to be a poet with a marvelous knack for transforming the familiar and forgotten into something odd, gentle and worth remembering:

Somewhere Between Here and There

At dusk, when tide is low, the silver water turns dull
unpolished and scratched by wind that growls
across the tips of waves, choppy as a see-saw.
The fish are lined up on the shore like soldiers,
washed up after bobbing along the froth.
Rattling, red-brown leaves shake on branches
and, shaking off inhibitions, fly away with a dry rustle,
scratching together airborn–like insect wings.
The smell of the salt off the sea is dry;
it sticks in the throat before the wind
changes directions, but leaves a scaly aftertaste.
The fish on the sand are the biggest I’ve ever seen,
swollen and half-buried beneath drifts of salt and sand.
I reached over and traced the edges of the scales,
dry instead of wet, glinting like well-worn pennies.
Their mouths were open tunnels, big enough to hold
a matchbox racecar, but lined with white teeth,
tiny as maggots, nothing inside but ink.
The eye sockets were deep and dark,
the gelatinous membranes eaten away,
empty as a playroom outgrown and abandoned
somewhere between here and there.

Songs of ours where Mary’s poetry can be heard:

An old piece of mine called One Of Many Dinner Conversations [mp3 6.3MB], and two songs off of the new album, A Maze and Amazement, called Solitaire [video on cliptip] and Remember The Stillness.

Remember The Stillness
Solitaire

I can’t rememember the precise moment when I started paying more attention to the combination of spoken word and music, but suffice it to say it’s been a few years now, and my interest in it continues to intensify. Here are three marvelous examples from the classical world:

Exerpt from Knee 5 by Philip Glass (from his opera “Einstein On The Beach”):

Philip Glass – Knee 5

Exerpt from Steve Reich’s The Cave:

Exerpt from Delta Run by Annea Lockwood:

Annea Lockwood – Delta Run

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