The Night Land was performed live on stillstream.com March 17, 2013. Done using midi controller, Linux and public domain field recordings. Music fashioned using the buddhalizer --a virtual extension of the imagination.

Several variations were re-imagined over the following months. This is the original performance.

Looking back on it now I can see this was a key performance in the evolution of Grove of Whispers. Everything seems to turn inside out. What sounded like synthesizers could be field recordings, while that which sounds like field recordings (the wind for example) is completely synthesized.

Everything here is fashioned algorithmically or from field recordings (including a washer machine), some of which was processed via spectral manipulation into drones.

I had started along this path with the idea of using my own field recordings: manipulating, processing, abstracting them from their sources. Along the way I found that using other people's field recordings was (at least for grove) an essential part of this process of abstraction. Somehow when the recordings are mine I am too close to them.

When I heard this played back I thought "well that's nice, but I could do it better", what I learned from trying was to respect what happens in the moment of performance. This is one of those moments. I hope you enjoy it.

Cover adapted from a photograph taken by Ricardo Lago.

"Always, it seemed to me when I awaked into the Future, into the Everlasting Night that lapped this world, that I saw near to me, and girdling me all about, a blurred greyness. And presently this, the greyness, would clear and fade from about me, even as a dusky cloud, and I would look out upon a world of darkness, lit here and there with strange sights. And with my waking into that Future, I waked not to ignorance; but to a full knowledge of those things which lit the Night Land; even as a man wakes from sleep each morning, and knows immediately he wakes, the names and knowledge of the Time which has bred him, and in which he lives. And the same while, a knowledge I had, as it were sub-conscious, of this Present—this early life, which now I live so utterly alone."

- William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land (1912)

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