Home » Audio » Five Thousand Feathers
Five Thousand Feathers
4th Oct 2024
Five Thousand Feathers was mostly written and recorded over the past six years and includes twelve original songs and two instrumental interludes. The songs are about our relationships with the physical world, the digital world, and each other.
There are jackdaws, moons, ecosystem infections generated by surveillance capitalism, love songs, telescopes, miniature sci-fi stories, a longing for a flask of tea by the river, and lots of other things.
It features singing, viola, violin, keyboards, drums, bass, electric guitar, recorders, melodica, EWI, gamelan samples, and strange noises.
Liner Notes
01 Rags and Questions
02 The Two Before the Five
03 Invisible Threads
04 Jackdaw
05 Constellation
06 Crow Alley
07 Dataphage
08 Easier to Write
09 Come Down and See
10 Hymn of the Orbital
11 Split
12 Long Low Light
13 Horsetail
14 Vignette No. 2
Rags and Questions
The systems of capitalism that restricted humanity’s actions in tackling the climate crisis have been destroyed, along with most life. A tiny population of people remains in a wasteland. What happens now? This song does not answer that question, but perhaps subvocalises another: can we even avoid getting to that point, and what should we be doing right now?
The song’s central idea is that in order to progress in a meaningful way, any innovation in the way that we live needs to be combined with the documentation and analysis of past mistakes, and we must ensure none of those mistakes can be buried or obfuscated. Throughout society, saying “I was wrong” or “I made a mistake” is largely seen as a sign of weakness, right down to the individual level; whereas logically it should be regarded as a sign of transparency, honesty, and trustworthiness. Obviously on a macro level this has disastrous consequences.
At the time of writing this song I had not anticipated that I would be releasing it – for its original release on the EP Sun-Scorched Songs of Sorrow – just a few days after the temperature here in the UK had passed 40°C for the first time on record.
[index]
The Two Before the Five
[I’m going to quote Ursula Le Guin too much in this.]
This song is about a lot of things, but primarily about pivot points, and the redirection of energy into something unexpected. It was also a response to the idea that the amount of dystopian art in existence heavily outweighs the attempts at utopia building, and if we are to envisage a better world, modelling what it might look like in art – alongside and contrasted with what we don’t want it to look like – is part of that process.
“… the kind of thinking we are, at last, beginning to do about how to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and long-term survival is a shift from yang to yin, and so involves acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness, and the earth.” (Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters, 2017)
To (seemingly) completely change the subject, this song came about because I started to see the II-V-I cadence as a metaphor for many different aspects of life on many different levels, although I don’t think I was really conscious that this was what the song was about until I had finished writing it. Central to it is the idea that even if we implement an intention to preserve energy and retain momentum rather than being carried by force into a stop (i.e. using II-V as a pivot to modulate to a new space, rather than as the lead-up to an inevitable stop on I), such continuation – even at the level of trying to keep things more or less the same before implementing improvements, such as the retaining of a habitable biosphere or a happy relationship – is always more work, and the more closely you examine that work, the more fractal it becomes.
“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” (Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven, 1971)
[index]
Invisible Threads
This was written in early 2019, and originally released as a demo with vocal and piano only, before the addition of several other instruments for the EP named after it. It’s about hopes for the endurance of friendship and love throughout hardships; a pattern which we no doubt see repeating over and over. I wrote this a year before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic; but reviewing the song in 2021 it sounded to me like something which would be written sometime after the end of such an event.
[index]
Jackdaw
There is an idea baked into the culture that exists under capitalism that there are two separate systems: “nature” and “us.” This is something we need to unlearn. But “capitalism” and “living creatures” is a division we might do well to recognise. Capitalism would have us believe that we are included within it; whereas in reality, the majority of humanity is just another “resource” to be exploited.
[index]
Constellation
This song was composed in late 2018 using a mixture of Western instruments and sampled gamelan instruments. There’s a very niche musical joke embedded in it, in which the violins play the balungan and the mipil patterns that some of the gamelan instruments would be playing if it was a traditional Javanese piece.
The lyric fell into my head almost fully formed while I was doing the washing up, as if it had been hovering in the ether, waiting for someone who needed to write it at that exact moment.
[index]
Crow Alley
This is a brief instrumental interlude which was a lot of fun to create. It reminded me of the alley next to a flat I used to live it. It also reminded me I really like making this kind of music and that I should remember to do it more often.
[index]
Dataphage
An extrapolation of the potential for surveillance data and retroactive legislation to be mixed together and used in highly unethical ways. The original inspiration for this song came about when two things happened in the same week, sometime around 2012: one was that a US woman whose Google search for a pressure cooker, which coincided with someone else in her house shopping for backpacks, resulted in a visit from the FBI; and the other was that the UK government, having done something illegal related to employment law, retroactively changed the law so that actually what they had done “wasn’t” illegal. I do not have sources for either of these news stories because internet search engines are so broken now that I can’t find them, if they are still online at all. (If anyone can find them, please let me know!)
I didn’t actually start writing the song properly until the summer of 2019, with the lyric being completed in November 2019, and thus the imagery was not influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. As you will have hopefully deduced if you have read this far, the song has nothing to do with that event. However, it is a rather weird coincidence which made me hesitant to release it for a while, as a casual ear might interpret “surveillance as infection” as being a rather awkward semi-metaphor for said pandemic. Now I’ve released it I will just have to see how many people (other than my mum) actually do think that.
[index]
Easier to Write
This song is fairly standard piano-based singer-songwriter fare, although with the slightly less standard addition of an EWI. (For those not familiar with this instrument – a group which included me until 2020 – it stands for Electronic Wind Instrument, and it’s a synth controller in a wind paradigm.)
Amongst other aspects, the song is about the interplay between more introverted and more extraverted personalities. A lot has been written all over the internet in recent years about how these two “sides” can be at odds with each other; but perhaps fewer words, cartoon strips and memes have been devoted to the ways that they can be very complementary. (And I should also mention I don’t even regard it as a strict dichotomy, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this liner note.)
[index]
Come Down and See
This song is a science-fiction allegory for the corporatisation of the internet.
The internet of the late 90s was a big part of my social life, even though this mainly involved people I never met. Then one day in 2005 I found out about corporate social media, and the ability to form meaningless connections by clicking a button that said “add as friend” just to boost one’s follower statistics, and I remember feeling a kind of dread in my whole body – because this new, empty slickness would surely destroy the messy, organic, long-winded, complex ecosystem of the internet I loved and was part of.
I didn’t know all the wider implications for global systems and society that would ultimately result, in part because at the age of 24 I didn’t know much about anything other than folk music, HTML, dog breeds, how to live on £50 a week, and public transport connections across the north of England. Others, who didn’t have my particular set of privileges, knew a lot more, sometimes from first-hand experience (e.g. Hossein Derakhshan, who explains more comprehensively and eloquently than I ever could).
I duly signed up for a MySpace account, because that was where the internet-party had migrated, then Facebook when the party moved there. Eventually I left Facebook, which was a wrench, but ultimately I knew I had to remove myself from it – not just because of a moral objection to its wider business practices but also because I could feel the ways it was designed to emotionally manipulate its users (deliberately exploiting vulnerable bits of our psychologies which evolved to survive in a completely different environment, as mentioned above), and that they were working on me even though I was conscious of them, and it felt really unhealthy. Initially when I closed my Facebook account I felt horrifyingly lonely and disconnected, and the fact that a corporation was able to do that to me emotionally – to effectively own my social life – was further evidence that leaving was the right decision. Maybe others can compartmentalise better and don’t feel this, but I certainly needed to get out.
Web 1.0 still exists, of course, sort of – albeit in this kind of hybridised form in which you can mostly only find interesting sites via social media (of course), because search engines don’t work the way they used to and people stopped using “Links” pages because people used them to game the search engines, so the search engines started penalising the websites that had them. But the song is a small attempt at utopia building, nonetheless.
This note was originally written for the first release of this song on the EP Long Low Light. The difference between now and then, for me, is that when the EP was released, I was not using any social media at all, whereas in the interim I joined Mastodon, and this has been a very positive experience for me so far.
Coincidentally, this song has some elements in common with the 2019 film Io, directed by Jonathan Helpert, even though the film’s premise has nothing to do with social media.
[index]
Hymn of the Orbital
A song modelled on secular folk hymns, with a Hammond organ in quarter-comma meantone tuning thrown in for good measure (incidentally, while persuading the software Hammond organ plugin to go into meantone, we found out that in the physical world this is completely impossible due to the way that Hammond organs work, but that’s probably more than you needed to know).
The lyric woke me up in the middle of the night in the spring of 2019 and demanded to be written down.
[index]
Split
This is the oldest recording on the album – an instrumental interlude recorded back in 2012. I don’t even remember how the cracking noises were created (although Xenogon suspects it was a sound that was slowed down a lot). It's been lurking for years waiting for a home, and now it finally has one.
[index]
Long Low Light
I started writing this song in 2013. It went through many iterations, and the version in this recording finally arrived in 2019. It’s about climate change denial (in the song this takes a particular, speculative/fictionalised form specific to high latitudes). The effects of climate change have become increasingly tangible even during the time it took me to write this song – and yet there are (apparently?) still some people denying its existence.
The song explores the ideas that human instinct and emotions evolved in response to a very different world to the one we live in now; that what our emotions tell us is happening might sometimes be at odds with objective reality; and that we (and the swathes of other species we’re taking down with us) cannot possibly evolve and adapt to the world we’re turning the planet into at the same speed as these changes occurring.
It was influenced by Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, and Love is the Plan the Plan is Death by James Tiptree, Jr. It’s a type of prog folk made from part folk song, part string quartet, part metal, and part madrigal.
[index]
Horsetail
Equisetum or horsetail (also commonly but incorrectly called mare’s tail, including by me until recently, but it turns out that’s actually a different plant entirely) is the only surviving genus of a family of plants that dates back hundreds of millions of years. These plants are described as living fossils, terrible invasive weeds, or a useful source of materials for organic fungicide, depending on who you ask. Will they survive the next extinction event?
[index]
Vignette No. 2
A reworking of an old song from ten years previously, which only had one verse. (You can hear this on my first album, Roll as a Hexagon.) This new version can stand alone, but also can be viewed as a second verse to the original, documenting another tiny slice of zeitgeist a bit further down the road.
[index]