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by our faint shadows going before us

by Luke Martin

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  • All Sky 2 (booklet+CD)
    Book/Magazine

    'by our faint shadows going before us' is a booklet & music. The 72 page booklet includes photos, text, and the score, as well as quotations from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal (1798). The music is performed by the quartet 'Short Americans' (Luke Martin, Noah Ophoven-Baldwin, Max Wanderman, Adam Zahller).

    Limited run of 25 hand-made booklets with CDs

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1.
by our faint shadows going before us - part 1 23:46
2.
by our faint shadows going before us - part 2 16:27
3.
by our faint shadows going before us - part 3 19:59

about

'by our faint shadows going before us' is an attempt to sustain a
correspondence with and for nobody. it holds hope that in doing
this it can sustain the conditions under which it may be
corresponded to by nobody. this is to say, it holds hope that
we can know the soul.

‘nominations’ of a soul which has, so to speak, become
momentarily aware of itself are chanced upon, anonymous, and
absolute. they carry the Idea of chance. one such nomination is
‘Dorothy Wordsworth’ and her alfoxden journal, on which the
text in this booklet is based. another, lodged within
wordsworth’s book (itself acquired on a whim), is a blank
postcard of ‘Glencoyne Wood’ by the sea in england, which is
pictured in the booklet alongside the text.

nominations are the opposite of monuments. they affirm the
existence of empty points, blank letters, silences. dorothy
wordsworth’s silence, in which for me she appeared as the
nomination ‘Dorothy Wordsworth’, began at a particular point
in the text. this was then confirmed by a second point,
instantaneous with the awareness that her entries were now,
as they had already been, saturated with silence. she writes:

‘30th. Walked I know not where.
31st. Walked.
1st. Walked by moonlight.’

the Idea shines through us unseen;
our steps—the moon—
‘by our faint shadows going before us.’

Note on the recording:
this version of the piece is ‘doubled’. we (Short Americans) made two recordings, one outside and one inside—each 45 minutes. we did the outside recording as a quartet and the inside individually. ‘out’ and ‘in’ were then overlaid and offset by 15 minutes: outside, 0’ – 45’; inside, 15’ – 60’.

on Bandcamp the recording is split into 3 parts due to file size limits. ideally the piece should be heard continuously. on the CD it is presented as one track, no breaks.

credits

released September 1, 2023

Composed by Luke Martin

Performed by Short Americans:
Luke Martin, guitar
Noah Ophoven-Baldwin, cornet
Max Wanderman, accordion
Adam Zahller, guitar

Recorded in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US (Spring 2023)

Mixed and mastered by Luke Damrosch

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All Sky Minneapolis, Minnesota

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A place to allow it all—sky, earth, dirt, space and time, to be here and there all at once.

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