| Go Back Back for your listening pleasure! The Tales Told In Dim Eden This
is a compilation of tunes that were recorded as far
back as the 1970's.
It was first released in the late 1980's and remastered in 2019. |
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1 -Under Saurian Skies
Under Saurian Skies is
one of my earliest en devours. I started writing it in the late 60's as
a premonition of the Apocalypse mixed with my budding interest in all
things dinosaurs and environmentalism.This is LOOOOOOONG. No hooks, no
refrains, no 'beat'. It is just what happens when a person with an
interest in the state of the environment
and symphonic electronic music gets paranoid and
depressed.
The video is stuff I crammed onto the song some years back (before HD) because no one just listens to music anymore without a video and it seemed appropriate anyway. I can't believe that after 45 years it still describes how I feel about these things.
This song is undanceable, therefore it is without commercial potential. Some of my best work. |
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2 - Benny The Bug Just a jazzy little instrumental about being pestered by an insect in the middle of the night. It is cartoon music. If you don't like cartoon music, sorry. I think its funny. Wrote it back in the early 80's and it has rattled around in my head for decades, so I finally turned it loose. A technical note: No way can I play this tune up to speed on a guitar or synth anymore. Hands too slow these days. All the melody and bass lines were sequenced on an Arturia Beastep Pro sequencer. Normally a tool for writing beats and repetative percussion lines, the sequencer can be tamed to do melody pretty convincingly if you are of a mind and have the patience. |
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3 - The White Ship My cover of the tune by the Chicago based "Folk Psychedelic" band HP Lovecraft. I believe it was written (or at least released) by George Edwards ( real name: Ethan Kenning) in 1972. Besides HP Lovecraft, the only other artist that I know of to record this song was Chad Mitchell, whose vocal work is exceptional and also worth a listen. This song is based on the short story of a lonely lighthouse keeper, written by the author H. P. Lovecraft in 1909. But anyone who has stood by the window at night and watched clouds rolling across the moon should be able to identify with this lovely little tune. |
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4 - Voice of the Ancestral Shrew I wrote the poem to
this my final year in college
(1990) but didn't put it to music until a few years later when, after
an accident with a log splitter left me without a functional thumb
for a month, I had to do SOMETHING with only 1 hand. Here,
the ancestral mammal to us all get to have his say about the
world we inhabit.
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5 - Sir Patrick Spens A very old and venerable Scottish ballad for which no definite historical basis can be found. It has survived hundreds of years of re-interpretion. This is mine. In trying to discover its roots, the only solid fact that can be tied to it is a burial cairn on the island of Papa Stronsay, one of the Orcadian group, lying over against Norway that has always been known from time immemorial as the burial site of "Sir Patrick Spens". Interestingly, while the name "Patrick Spens" is Scottish, the people of the island are descended from the Norse and never spoke Gaelic or English. In fact, they knew nothing of the ballad when scolars went there and interviewed them. There are a gazillion versions of the song. I based this one on a 1950's field recording made in a Scottish pub. If you are a "folk music purist", my apologies. I do get it. There will always be a place for the traditionalist point of view. But I like it this way too. |
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6 - The Song of SkyLore Engine Sky Lore Engine is an epic poem written by Alex Wiener. Back in my late teens I hooked up with a couple of Alex's friends, Joel Seaman and Peter Prince, who were part of the north Jersey "beat" folk music scene and had put these 2 verses of the poem to music. It was kind of a madrigal, on accoustic guitars. The quality of the poetry stuck with me long after I lost track of those guys. Decades passed, and a just a few years ago, I decided to find Alex and see if it was OK to go ahead and publish my personal take on the song. He loved it and even sent me a copy of the book. Based on the melodies of Joel and Peter, I expanded the song into a quasi-electro-orchestral interpretion. |
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7 - Remember Kumbrabow I graduated from West Virginia University at the age of 40 with a degree in Forest Resource Management while this was going down. At the time this major should have been titled "Forest Dismemberment for Fun and Profit". Anyway, to blow off the accumulated negative energy, one of the things I did was write this song, "Remember Kumbrabow". |