In spring of 2023, I took a trip to visit my sister in France, also taking the opportunity to visit several other countries that I have wanted to visit for a long time. It was an incredible trip that had a great impact on me. Most importantly, I learned a lesson while there, that the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Most of the songs in this album are meant to be representative of a place that I visited. But more than that, these songs are representations of my feelings towards those places, not exactly "the sound of the country" that you might hear in your head when you think "France" or "Germany".
Though I believe one of the wonders of music is how anyone can listen to the same piece and interpret something different in it, I still wanted to include a bit of context as to what I was thinking about each of these different pieces. If you hear something else than what I did when interpreting a song, great! There's no incorrect interpretation of any of these pieces of music, but if you'd like to know a little about what went through MY head while playing, I'll be including that in the description of each song.
Clockwork Underground is a piece that is representative of my time in Berlin, Germany. My time there was relatively short, but in the 2 and a half days in the city, I was struck by the timeliness of everything. The underground train ran like absolute clockwork, far better than any of the other (also quite good) train systems. This seemed to extend broadly to the general Berliner mindset, but that was offset by a lot of fun, as well. It's not exactly a secret that the Germans like to drink, after all. I tried to imagine both of these extremes while playing, with the orderliness of the lefthand accompanied by a more chaotic and unpredictable right hand, culminating in a slightly dissonant combination of the two.
16 окт 2024
