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ELWOOD HERRING'S MUSIC CATALOGUE
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Play Size Mins "I Am the Dreamer of Dreams..." op.52 (Aug 2005)
      Finally completed after months of planning, this "sound painting" is based around (and includes) my poem "The Dreamer of Dreams" (read it here.) This is the nearest I can get to depicting a world inside a disturbing dream by using sound alone. It depicts (or attempts to depict) a real and very disturbing dream I had years ago.
Part 1
"I, Enkidu"
    6Mb  06:40 This first section was put together with samples from the Waldorf synth. I tried to create a moody surrealistic sound here to set the scene. The piece as a whole still makes sense without this introduction however.
Part 2:
"Descent"

Part 3:
"She"
   28Mb  23:10 No synthesisers at all here - sound sources include foxes, birds, children playing, and other sounds all recorded from my back garden. This might sound rather boring by that description alone, but all those original sounds have been thoroughly mixed, stirred, dissected, atomised, rearranged and reconstituted into an awesome soup of sound. Not a word of the poem is heard for about 12 minutes. At about 19:10 to 19:40 there is a faint "ghostly" voice that sounds as if it's lecturing - this is a fluke arising from the filtering software I used. There is no voice, only random noise. But it's so creepy I just had to keep it in. You can almost make out individual words. I have the original wave files to prove that it's just noise, but it's spooky all the same. Similar things have happened to me before, notably in Interference and Ghost in the Machine.
Part 4:
"Wraiths"

Part 5:
"Awakening"
   10Mb  14:33 Follows on from the previous section without a break, this starts off with the "Wraith speech" part of the poem. All sorts of sound manipulation techniques were utilised here, and the original voice (mine) was recorded backwards! (I recorded each line separately, then played it back in reverse a few times and learned to say what I heard backwards. Then I recorded myself speaking this reverse language, and flipped it round again to get the eerie voice.) Then I added echo, chorus, reverb and other effects to get the finished speech. The final part of the poem is heard, then the "awakening" section brings the listener slowly back to reality.



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