"The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt."
A.E. Housman
about
My June 2020 release is entitled "TO E.A.H." - it is a hommage to the english writer E.A.Housman, whose poetry I recently fell in love with. Earlier this year, I read a poem of Housman in the preface of a book of Arthur C. Clarke: "The toil of all that be / helps not the primal fault / it rains into the sea / and still the sea is salt."
I love looking up into the skies - the clouds, the stars, space - endless wideness - seeing all those quadrillions of stars, galaxies out there, thinking about all the worlds, that must be out there, gives me the comforting feeling of being just one tiny little drip of rain in the salty ocean. It really helps me to chill out and take a step back, which seems to be an exercise still to be practiced for me, to remind myself that however important this deadline or this email feels, it is totally unimportant if I put it into the framing of me being this tiny little drip of rain in the ocean. I feel pretty cheezy writing these lines, but actually mean them. Sometimes, I feel, it is something beautiful and calming to take a step back and consider myself just a little drip of rain in the ocean.
I recorded these two pieces on a modified cassette tape player that I have. I managed to disable the delete head of it. That means, every time you record something on it, the tape recorder doesn't delete the information that had been on the cassette tape before. Through that you can staple track onto track onto track onto track with it. I fooled around with this technique for a bit, randomly recording sounds with my electric upright bass, field recordings, my voice onto the tape. After a while I listened to it - the denseness of the recorded music, sometimes clearly hearable, sometimes drowning in the white noise of the cassette, gave me kicks. I remembered that poem by E.A.Housman, that I read and started reciting it onto the tape, over and over and over again. Well, and that's how these two tracks came together! Sometimes it's so simple :)
All my love,
Malo
credits
released June 26, 2020
Upright Bass, Live Electronics, Field Recordings, Drum Machine, Vocals, Conceptual Cassette Player - Martin 'Malo' Riebel
Lyrics - Edward Alfred Housman
Recorded, Mixed, Produced - Martin 'Malo' Riebel
Artwork - Martin 'Malo' Riebel
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