Structures of Glass is my contribution to The Big Calm (a collaborative piece written by members of Cafe Noodle).
It started life as a title borrowed from a post on BLDGBLOG that imagined:
vast turbulent structures of glass move through the global atmosphere, posing a dire threat to machinery and drifting across whole continents in a kind of low-intensity storm of aerosolized crystal… The speculative climatology of alien worlds.
I loved the notion, and tried to take inspiration by downloading a load of pretty glass pictures from flickr, renaming them WAV files, opening them up in an audio editor and seeing what weird noises I could get out of them.
Mostly I got static, but slowing it down enough and adding some effects produced some interesting sounds.
With that as a background I set to work with a few notes from D minor (Initially D E F A Bb). A brief sojourn into the relative major and the music was complete.
The lyrics of course are about something completely different. I’m not entirely sure what:
Had enough of floating crystals, want to smash them all to shards
Had enough of all your miracles, your shiny house cards
Couldn’t just for once a brighter light be shone into the sky
couldn’t just for once an ugly truth come along to wipe away your smile
Had enough of all this beauty, had enough of all this gold
had enough of all this freedom, the best parts already sold
Couldn’t just for once a brighter light be shone into the sky
couldn’t just for once an ugly truth come along to wipe away your smile
These structures of glass
Were dazzling me
A light from our past
A fixed geometry
But the slightest hammer blow
could take it all apart
The slightest hammer blow
Could take it all apart
These structures of glass
PS totally unrelated, by don’t forget to watch my Ustream gig Wednesday 2nd June 8pm BST (or later on the archive). Click Here!