A few months ago, my friend Valeska asked me if I’d like be her musical accompaniment for her performance at the annual Baltimore Crankie Fest. She told me she was working on a crankie/shadow puppet story about her wildlife sitings juxtaposed with the omnipresence of plastic in one of our local waterways, Herring Run. I’ll find a way to share a link to the performance soon. And you can read more musings about my involvement below.
I haven’t done much live accompaniment before, but I immediately said yes. I was curious and excited to be invited to work on this project. Even more, I felt some strong synchronicity.
Throughout 2017, I was writing material for my environmental song cycle, Lake Accotink. I remember that spring, constructing the lyrics for my song “10,972 Meters”, It was a song for the sea, that started up in the sky. I was on my way back from a trip to France, where I spent a lot of time walking along the Brittany coastlines. I remember visiting Île-de-Bréhat, an island accessible by ferry.
Île-de-Bréhat
Vianney and I nicknamed it Bicycle Island because there aren’t really any cars or roads on the island. Some tractors and utility vehicles here and there, but most people get around by foot or bike. When we got onto this beautiful island, we kept finding little pieces of trash along the shore. It made me think about Chris Jordan’s photo series about the Albatross population on the Midway Atolls. And so on my way home from France, a song started to form.
One evening, during Light City 2017, I biked down to the Inner Harbor to check out some events. Right before I left, I randomly felt like putting on a seashell necklace. As I walked along the harbor at sunset, I worked out some more lyrics for “10,972 Meters”, something along the lines of “I read by 2030, 9 out of 10 sea creatures will have swallowed a piece of plastic….I wanna help them all, but where do I begin? I think about my unborn children, what kind of world will they inherit?”
Then I came across Valeska’s art installation along the water. I’m not sure my recalling of it will do it justice, but I felt like I was entering the skeleton frame of a whale. She was sitting at the end of this tunnel in a little alcove, channeling Riparia, a water entity that was conducting ecological tarot card readings.
She invited me and another person to participate in a reading. We sat down together and she asked us to give our names as well as the body of water we were from. I said I was Marian from Lake Accotink, and I can’t remember his name anymore, but my neighbor was from the Dog River, The Nahr al-Kalb in Lebanon. We pulled cards and talked about ecological and social issues with Riparia, who reminded us of interconnection and impermanence, two main themes circulating through my developing album, Lake Accotink. She closed out the reading by showing us a handmade map of the Chesapeake Bay. I don’t know why I always felt like the Chesapeake was so far away. Seeing that map that night reminded me of how we are so close to it. Especially as we sat with a harbor view.
Moving forward to the end of 2018, there I was, getting music together for Valeska’s piece Herring Run. I wasn’t sure what approach to take, as I had a number of instruments to choose from. I wanted to try something different, and Valeska encouraged me to explore using my newly acquired synth. I also got my hands on a sampler thanks to my friend Mike, which became a game changer. I learned how to use it pretty quickly and uploaded a bunch of ambient, droning synth loops as well as some field recording sounds like songbird whistles and geese in flight.
The whole creative process reminded me of the idea of sculpting…starting with a huge chunk of raw material, adding some here and there, and then taking away to really make something emerge.
We didn’t have a whole lot of time between our rehearsal and the first performance, but everything came together beautifully. After our first rehearsal, someone said they felt like we entered another world. I thought about how we entered the real world, the world of dream and ritual, the world that always is. How the world we usually spend our time in is another world, designed for other purposes…
So it was a pleasure to spend the first weekend of January living inside of the dreamy world of Crankie Festival. I admired that many of the crankies shared themes about environmental and social justice. I enjoyed having a chance to create music outside of my own songwriting practice. It was a fun challenge to work on doing something incredibly new and to get to collaborate with awesome artists like Valeska, Azaria, Dirk, and Sun.
Photo by Ana Tantaros of Side A Photography