"Landscapes for New Mexico" is an album comprising eight tracks that represent a series of idiosyncratic, inexplicable, observed-or-imagined landscapes, influenced by the artist's peculiar experience of time-space living in northern New Mexico. The music, primarily composed on acoustic guitar accompanied by instruments like Mellotron, bass, percussion, and harmonium, captures different affective shimmers tied to abstract associative weavings of indigenous and invasive plants, greater and lesser creatures, ritualistic walking paths, and deep time secrets. The album serves as a metaphorical portrait of internal and external landscapes as feeling tones informed by the presences and absences of this subtly enchanted place.
Track 1: Canyon Towhee Song
In early summer, wiping the hibernation from the eyes, waking up to an ecstatic pulse of sunbeams passing through atmospheric scrim, of scintillating insects and Brownian motion pollen fog dusting across stratified layers of perception, of the mist rising from gurgling tributaries, the swaying of Apache plumes, the buzzing of cicadas, weaving together in a matrix-song tapestry, the sun rings a bell upon the loom, the piñon whistles the weft into tune.
Track 2: Juniper and Horehound Song
The laziness of late summer heat rippling on near and distant horizons, acerbic gin berries, scratchy bittersweet tongues lashing the ankles, calm bodies baking on the blood black rocks lining the Rio Grande, fingers exploring the lichen crevices between burnt stones, contemplative closeness and rust flavored openness, laying horizontal toes held upwards, soft gaze upon the azure umbrella sky, the slurping flow of chocolate-emerald pools.
Track 3: Ascending and Descending Sagebrush Ocean
Crisp silver dew approach of autumn, subtle shifts in new purples and eye burst pinks on minty sage dropping their fragment death blooms, dawn portraits of stillness, sepia tone avian visitors, a neuroelastic time-space inviting bitter tea and sweet thinking, undulating foundations, aching melancholy of distant mountain peaks, early snow evaporating on warm caliche.
Track 4: Dolomite Staircase (Stones Splitting in Disregard for Human Paths)
Ascending unforgiving granite, cartilage grindstones, ruby ribbon veins, descending breath, mental cartography across diagonal slopes, horizontal tensions straining geological visions, green and orange illustrations of ancient decay, erosion of ambition, unapologetic giving-over of/to solitude, the choir of the mind that sings at peak vistas, seeing farther than the eye can travel.
Track 5: Wind Song
Oh noble-violent invisible greatness, unforgiving air pressures against calcium and adobe, tentacular pneumatic fingers wafting through undiscovered weaknesses, your smell of wet elsewhere, ungraspable overwhelm, inhuman roar raging across pure distance, show us your gold black flashes, ominous overhead moisture silos, twirling hyperobject shredding away the dignity between disembodied contemplators, you are a cold that cannot be befriended, primordial bass, hellish trebles, paleontological screams, hail felled mutely in the moondust.
Track 6: Pastoral Portraiture
A counterpoint to chaos though no less distributed, uncanny comforts of profound stillness, Mountain Bluebirds welcoming from lost gate posts, vast voids ever-filling powdered warmth, hommage to the pauses between Ennio Morricone’s breakfast reveries, mingling of bone chime dangles and hummingbird choreography, grotesque timelessness, sensing all paths as labyrinths, sitting still while the hills run, that moment of epiphany upon the mound, near the illustrated walls, longing for light filled caves.
Track 7: High Altitude Walking Song
Holding breath, short of air, abundant contemplations most keen in the morning, mourning the loss of daybreak, transversing recumbent planes, plain physicality stirring low burs, hummus hums, woolen gravity, sore knee determinism, dreams caught in the throat, existential metronome haunting always behind, meat body slapping foamy loam below, earth magnitude bellows, scurrying unknowns beneath tarantula dens, petrified terrestrial heat-air organs, a collective hallucination of place-based tone, the familiar comforts of continuous repetitive movements that render it all - the all - bearable.
Track 8: Early Spring Snow Melt Song
The thin scrim threshold between endings and beginnings, residual once-heavy snows hiding in the underbrush, purple-gold spectrum, crunch snap ice deposits receding from sight, the sound of sunlight on drying pewter wood beams, transitional impermanent provisional warmth, constant fires and smoke hair, drips puttering somewhere unseen unseeing, remembering how to start again.
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Best wishes,
TW
