Residency is a two-part journal entry brought to you by one of our favorite creatives.
This week, the Fort Collins, CO-based outfit Sound of Ceres share some words from their video collaborator and give us an inside look at their forthcoming album.
Sound of Ceres - “Bryn Marina”
David Harris writes:
For over a year, my DSLR has been clicking away on fishtanks full of grow-in-water toys, in hopes that the clips of primordial creatures squirming into some kind of life would come together as a music video. Nine months into the slow, slow process of 3-day to 1-week long shots, I emailed footage to Karen Hover and Ryan Hover of the band Candy Claws. I had fallen in love with their album Ceres and Calypso in the Deep Time in summer of 2014 and they were my dream collaborators for the project.
Lucky for me, Karen and Ryan were open and generous about letting me in on their new project, Sound of Ceres, and we started working together—me, finding creatures and crafting shots that complimented their nature-by-way-of-synthesizer dream-pop, and them—honing the song and adding incredible musical collaborators to the project: The Apples in Stereo and The Drums.
An inside look at our forthcoming album Nostalgia for Infinity:
Science shows us that the universe is immense beyond comprehension, and that all of human history is just a blink on a tiny dot. Yet the human experience puts each of us at the center of our own universe, looking out from a mind through our senses and living through long hours, days, and years, learning, feeling, creating. Perhaps the biggest aim of this album is to explore that dichotomy between what we know of the universe and what we actually experience. Which is more real?
There can be no collective human experience, for who is there to experience it? C.S. Lewis wrote about this somewhere in one of his books. The only kind of human experience that counts is the one that can actually be experienced by a human, namely his own individual experience. There are, of course, many things we do collectively, even globally, but experience itself happens at the level of the individual. So, to further refine the album’s theme, it’s not about humanity’s place in the universe, but the human experience in a universe that has become aware of itself through our consciousness.
Where does experience of the world actually happen? When I see something passing by, does the experience happen out there on my right? In my eyes? In my mind? Or all three?
Some characters and phrases that we’ll encounter in the lyrics throughout the album:
-Marina / shoreline: we live on the surface of our planet, our shore to the sea of open space
-Standing wave: each of us is our own standing wave, a form that persists while smaller cycles and particles pass and comprise part of that shape for only a short time
-Snowline / treeline: limits in nature beyond which certain things simply cannot occur. Our inability to fully comprehend the universe is our own version of this kind of line
Read Sound of Ceres’ first entry here.