“Bluing”
“Bluing”,an electronic/ambient composition by Arcinello Jocson and myself is out! This piece was commissioned by choreographer Daniella Hernandez and had a 4 day sold-out premier May 2023. When Dani came to us to compose this piece she mentioned the color blue, the ocean, human anxiety, versatility and rust. “Bluing” is the passivation process in which steel is partially protected against rust and we think humans go through a similar process to protect ourselves from anxiety. Composing this piece has led us to believe that facing our anxiety is how we protect ourselves from it. Acceptance of ourselves, an internal process so we can go about our external world. We hope it allows you the space to feel what you need to as it did for us. A thank you to Birgetta Johnson for the poignant cover art as well! 💙
Music: Leah McKeehan and Arcinello Jocson
Engineering: Arcinello Jocson
Cover Art: Birgetta Johnson
Literary References that Inspired the Music:
“To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you?” Maggie Nelson, Bluets
“The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it.” Maggie Nelson, Bluets
“For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable “memory fragment”—often called a “trace” or an “engram”—or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new “trace” to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be “scribbles,” “holograms,” or “imprints”; they could live in “spirals,” “rooms,” or “storage units.” Maggie Nelson, Bluets
“If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival.” Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.” Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost