Sunken Willows

 

Artificial intelligence is obviously more capable of evoking emotions than it was only a year ago. With this song, it's typically a cut-up of various diary entries, in this case, April 28ths. It also references a passage from W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, where he mentions sunken willows. The original title was Through Brundall on to Cantley, but the sunken willows image captured the mood perfectly. I also think that it's a nice combination of poetry and lyric, where they can kind of function the same way, with fragments of images, such as the fragmented nature of dream imagery. It's what's termed as “Sebaldian”--having to do with Sebald’s dreamy prose. The photography is also interesting, and was taken in the mid to late 19th century in the same area as the path that was taken in Rings of Saturn through towns in East Anglia (Cantley). The playlist also includes an ambient mix, which takes just the vocal set against various field recordings of wind and waves. 

"Through Brundall, Buckenham and Cantley, where, at the end of a straight roadway, a sugar-beet refinery with a belching smokestack sits in a green field like a steamer at a wharf, the line follows the River Yare, till at Reedham it crosses the water and, in a wide curve, enters the vast flatland that stretches southeast down to the sea. Save for the odd solitary cottage there is nothing to be seen but the grass and the rippling reeds, one or two sunken willows, and some ruined conical brick buildings, like relics of an extinct civilization." 

*** 

"It was on a grey, overcast day in August 1992 that I traveled down to the coast in one of the old diesel trains, grimed with oil and soot up to the windows, which ran from Norwich to Lowestoft at that time. The few passengers that there were sat in the half-light on the threadbare seats, all of them facing the engine and as far away from each other as they could be, and so silent, that not a word might have passed their lips in the whole of their lives. Most of the time the carriage, pitching about unsteadily on, the track, was merely coasting along, since there is an almost unbroken gentle decline towards the sea; at intervals, though, when the gears engaged with a jolt that rocked the entire framework, the grinding of cogwheels could be heard for a while, till, with a more even pounding, the onward roll resumed, past the back gardens, allotments, rubbish dumps and factory yards to the east of the city and out into the marshes beyond."