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Cities & Desire: Kellina Third Movement Harmony In Isolation

from Invisible Cities by ∞

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As you approach Kellina you first hear through the forests you trespass, a drifting lullaby, as of your mother when she has sung you to sleep and the barest of threads draw you back momentarily from slumber to consciousness and the soft sound of her whispering song.
As you draw nearer to the singing city, the lullaby becomes a chorale, the sound of many voices raised up in joy and praise. When you reach her gates, however, the sound changes again, to the babble of a creek, the mellifluous tones of water filling the air, each aural niche filled by its own appropriate communication/song.
Entering the city for the first time, you realize that all these sounds were the single sound of the city heard in a multitude of ways, each environment you passed through adding the music of its own sounds and reverbations, each ecology joining its song to Kellina's. Next you realize that the true sound of Kellina is a cacophony, one that momentarily stops you in your tracks and leaves you speechless. Indeed, this is no figure of speech, for in Kellina every citizen speaks a different language, yet despite this fact, they all can understand one another. On first arriving a visitor has no words, no language of their own, yet. They speak their native tongue, but none can understand them. It is only after a night or seven at the inn that the traveler begins to comprehend and be comprehensible as they learn to speak their own language and hear the languages of others. Their new polyglot grows richer and richer until they are fully fluent in their own Kellinian tongue. And then they hear again the songs that the city sings through its citizens, the music of the place.
When a group of visitors speaking the same language arrive, they understand one another, but if they stay, over time they join the symphony of voices, perhaps even without noticing that they no longer speak their birth language.
To stay in Kellina and become fluent in your own language, to join the city choir, though, is like all inexpressible experiences the greatest of joys but also the most damaging of addictions, for once you have spoken in your own personal tongue you can never truly speak another language and to leave Kellina is to become mute.

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from Invisible Cities, released March 23, 2023

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The Museum of Viral Memory Eugene, Oregon

A lifetime in noise & experimental stitched to the last 100 years of electroacoustic, ecoacoustic, concrete magique

Improv jazz come unpinned from time

Conceptual music built from field recordings

Sound art for dreaming, drifting, disappearing

Ritual magick, slow to cast; slow to coalesce

Invocations unintended for human ears

Music in geologic time

Aureality for the non-conscious mind ... more

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