https://emerge.bandcamp.com/album/migration-metamorphosis-1st-movement-migration
As I listened to this piece of music for the first time via earbuds, I was at the local laundromat. Cartoons I had never seen before were playing on the television courtesy of The Disney Channel. There were a lot of laundry carts everywhere and that really bothered me. A guy saw me cleaning them up, then came over and pulled one out from underneath a folding table instead of grabbing a stray one. Some guy sat within ten feet of me eating spicy wings and I'm not sure what this all means but as a visual to this music it was rather interesting. I wish I could've somehow recorded it as a short film.
"Migration" begins with these steel drum type of rhythms and that's really the story throughout the majority of this piece: the percussion. The percussion grows faster as big gongs strike. Boom! Boom! Boom! It has a tribal atmosphere to it. There is also this sound coming through which makes me think of birds flapping their wings and that's not just because of the title. A flute (?) comes into the background now but the huge bass drum is overpowering all of the other sounds now. I'm not sure what it is called, but my high school band had one and it is played with the giant sticks with white heads.
Bongos are a new way to deliver the percussion now and there is this feeling of wheels turning. These sort of space synth/lasers are added in and those drums still remain at the forefront. Roughly nine minutes in and it sounds like a storm is brewing. A little funk now. A deep drone creeping in the background. Lightsaber bursts. Banging and clanking away while soothing lasers enter the field. It becomes an electronic slowdown near the seventeen minute mark.
This has a bit of a birds in space sound to it but then it becomes this wild ping pong ball type of rhythm with the drums still firmly in place. Wall-E talks while it sounds like it's glitching hard. The percussion manages to maintain a sense of the song "Low Rider" still. Droids make their beeps and then a sound is heard which somehow feels like bubbles popping. As it intensifies it dawns on me that this has never really lost that tribal rhythm from the start.
As we near the end, it feels as if it is breaking down, self-destructing. You can literally hear the pieces begin to fall apart. Piano keys might be in there. A certain galloping, a driving pace and whirrs as well. It gets quieter with a deeper, haunted synth. A shaker. Ominous gongs. The percussion slows down but wants you to know it is still there. Dark, deep space drone brings us to an end and it feels like we have just drifted into space, out of reach of any known way to send further communication.
What I like about music and especially music such as this is that it's open to interpretation. On one hand, take a song like "Tom Sawyer" by Rush. I bet you can remember where you were when you first heard that song and when you hear it now it still takes you back there, right? Everyone can have those little unique stories, but at the end of the day we're all singing along to the same words. With something like this though, the specifics of it can become much more precise. I've tried but listening to it will likely only ever remind me of the laundromat and I hope you can have as special of an experience listening to it yourself.
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