I can no longer remember exactly how this project began. It was born from a time of lostness, when my own soul had become a stranger. I wanted to walk again in the intimate and tender ways I once had in my own internal landscapes. The project evolved, as projects often do, into what it became: an audiovisual exploration of and expression of and offering to places we both love.
The seven songs of the album add up to a total of thirty-three. 3×11=33. 33/7≈4min42.857sec.
I was to record the music and Steven was to film the videos. At each of the seven special locations, Steven would take the camera, and I would take my microphone and my notebook and pen. We often drifted apart. Falling between the cracks. Dissolving in the heady atmosphere of the places which were no longer outside or inside, but both. Strangely, there is no privacy profounder than the loss of self. I cannot know what it felt like to be Steven in those moments. Eye sliding over landscapes. As for me, I would lay on the rocks, on the soil, and feel the earth spin. I would listen. I would offer myself as a gift. I would ask for the greatest gift: to become the tongue of my beloved. It will perhaps seem presumptuous, but I had by this time grown too tired to fight against myself. I would offer myself despite my meagerness. And these are the songs they whispered. The poems were written in tunnels, under trees, on mountains, in a cemetery. The sounds were recorded on location and later at home, crouched on the bathroom floor where it’s quiet.
-Hazel Cline
