Shoal Hope Suite

Shaped Piano, 2021

Shoal Hope Suite

Music from another world.

This was one of my first recordings. At the time I didn’t have much more than audacity going for me musically speaking….

It’s taken this long to be able to mix and master this to my, at least temporary, satisfaction. I performed the original tracks while in the midst of my last push to finalize Shoal Hope and I’ve included excerpts from it in my audio-book. What is now available to me are artifacts of the original recording process. “Found objects” left over from a recording project now lost in past generations of computer-time.

Listening and working on it now, I’m struck by its strangeness. It has always seemed to fit with the spirit of Shoal Hope, the novel and the concept, in the way this all now feels like another time, another world. As with the novel, it is tied to an actual time; but is outside that time. Just as it was outside the time I wrote the book and recorded this piece. Shoal Hope has been an anomaly for me from its inception and this piece feels that way too. Both this piece and the novel; and its connections to my childhood and the particular ways the early Twentieth Century there got us here; have obsessed me since 2002 when the idea came to me while standing in line for a foot-long hot-dog in Lopes Square.

Try listening to it late at night. Give it a quarter of an hour if you would…. As with the novel, its length seems necessary to its integrity.