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Sabin, Joshua - Caochan
Sabin, Joshua - Caochan
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Caochan is a meditation on humans’ experience of landscape and temporality through a deep-time lens. Scottish composer Joshua Sabin imagines both as fluid and porous terrains where matter and perception merge, are annihilated, and resurface anew.
At the heart of the album are five poems by Scottish modernist writer and poet, Nan Shepherd (1893–1981). Sabin has translated each of these poems into music through a unique text-setting process.
To listen to the recordings is to be taken through five poems word by word. Every change in note corresponds to each syllable on the page, and melodic phrasing imitates the cadence and rhythm of the spoken word. Harmony and sonic textures then communicate and evoke the meaning of those words and the concepts within.
In Caochan, these poems take on a sonic physicality: words scatter through crystalline spring waters, drones writhe as forming igneous rock, and melodies soar as cataracts of wind. Through his translational approach, Sabin aims to preserve the poetic form and meaning within Shepherd’s work, while further exploring narratives of deep time, impermanence and existentialism in relation to the natural world.
On the album, Joshua Sabin performs and records an array of instruments and reforms these recordings into densely layered sonic gestures and hybrid timbres. Instruments include bowed cymbals, chimes, cello, chanter, pedal organ, concertina, low-D whistle, bass drum, bodhran, saxophone and rocks.
At the heart of the album are five poems by Scottish modernist writer and poet, Nan Shepherd (1893–1981). Sabin has translated each of these poems into music through a unique text-setting process.
To listen to the recordings is to be taken through five poems word by word. Every change in note corresponds to each syllable on the page, and melodic phrasing imitates the cadence and rhythm of the spoken word. Harmony and sonic textures then communicate and evoke the meaning of those words and the concepts within.
In Caochan, these poems take on a sonic physicality: words scatter through crystalline spring waters, drones writhe as forming igneous rock, and melodies soar as cataracts of wind. Through his translational approach, Sabin aims to preserve the poetic form and meaning within Shepherd’s work, while further exploring narratives of deep time, impermanence and existentialism in relation to the natural world.
On the album, Joshua Sabin performs and records an array of instruments and reforms these recordings into densely layered sonic gestures and hybrid timbres. Instruments include bowed cymbals, chimes, cello, chanter, pedal organ, concertina, low-D whistle, bass drum, bodhran, saxophone and rocks.
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