The Voyage Brings Us Home: WMRI's album "Moon Events"

I travelled and came home to myself, listening to this profound album.

direct link: Moon Events

I'm guessing the last track is the later studio one... the energy shifts quite dramatically in 'Excavation Site in Sector E-4.' Yet, as with the previous three, which were created in an on-air improvisation jam session for an hour long streaming radio show, it builds its soundscape with fast sliding repetition inside long tonal waves until you are caught in the swell, part of the story, enthralled with the expedition, unable to leave until the song has ended. Mike Winchester's music is hypnotic (in track notes he is listed as composer). There is speed, excellence, command: we know where we've come from and where we're going, it's the journey that's exciting. It grips us. And what a journey! The astronaut metaphor of visiting and populating the moon in a futuristic excavation creating a 'Moon Train Station' works beautifully with this Berlin School inspired music. Within sameness, and progression, come profound insights, enlightenments. I felt comforted listening. In the peace of dynamic opposites. 'Images of Light and Dark.' Unions. In the final piece, though seeming a departure from the earlier three, the music entirely stops perhaps half way through. Silence. What are we to do with this? Has the album ended? Is there an anomaly in the moonscape? But no, the silence is music. It all comes to rest. Sound gathers in its silence. That silence, like through a glass darkly, reveals what I consider a brilliant album that I will listen to again and again as I discover more deeply who I am by listening. Thank you WMRI.

                                                    

A Snow Globe

The landscape, a white squall while I walk through it. Snow thick as confetti. The Ice Queen married her King and the atmosphere swirled in celebration. My eyelids sting with windburn as their chariot rises into the north wind. After I found the street again it seemed the landscape between the hills had been shaken like a snow globe. Blue, blue sky, sunny, no wind.

                                                    

Midnight Sun: Wind Over Grass

From Midnight Sun: Wind Over Grass, 28" x 22", 71cm x 56cm, oil on canvas, 2010.

A painting depicting contact dance - which is... out of the dance studio, for sure, and into the dreamtime! And a solar eclipse, which reminds me of the black light, the midnight sun of the mystics.

When the river runs in bands, water ribbons her arm. Or she dances on rocks across. Those who support uphold everything in the underpainting. What is there to say of wheat fields or grass curling flames? Under the midnight sun strange dreams dance with intent.


This painting took 20 days to complete, from Jan 5th to 25th. Though I did initially work from an old sketch, I discarded it. The images developed, like in a dream, of their own volition organically. The figures and landscape are imaginal. It's finished, even if in 6 months when the oil paint is dry, I add a few details.

                                                    

Once Upon a Time there was a Dreaming Woman

Once upon a time there was a dreaming woman whose dreams were of the moon that the animals sang to.

When the flames came out of the fires in the dark night the people fell like stones and joined the earth.

Afterwards in the great scrolls it was written that a lake arose in the sky and the mountains flew like clouds.

Those who remained knelt before the great healer, a man with white flowing hair and copper woman breast-plates, and received the blessing of the future.

Golden grains of the earth filled the communal baskets of the dreaming woman.

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Dreamtime story I wrote based on the pictures of random Tarot cards at Caro Cloutier's Dreaming in the Dark Series.