Flowing Beauty

In the words of the composer, Hollan Holmes, “This album is all about water and my relationship with it. It is a celebration of the greatest natural resource on our fragile planet. Without it, we do not exist. The music I wrote for this album is an attempt to convey the beauty, importance and power of water in our world. This music is a mix of elements of Berlin School, some traditional melodic structures and emotional chord progressions, infused into an electronic music landscape. It is intended to be uplifting, contemplative and emotionally moving.”

Listening options: https://orcd.co/emerald-waters

Emerald Waters offers 1h 14m 40s of all the colors of the blue and green spectrum, celebrates a sharper, icier precision and fascination with melody and repetition and textures, and with implied messages about technology’s impact on the planet. A sound very much of the time, if not ahead of it: limpid notes purr around our heads, a flying saucer has landed bringing a fresh perspective about life on Earth. Times are changing, threats are growing, and now more than ever we must work together to protect what remains of our oceans and groundwaters.

Sometimes people refer to water informally with its equivalent word in Spanish, agua, or the Latin phrase aqua pura, meaning a colorless, transparent, odorless liquid that forms the seas, lakes, rivers, and rain and is the basis of the fluids of living organisms. A substance that is flowing, and keeping no shape; a substance of which the molecules, while not tending to separate from one another like those of a gas, readily change their relative position, and which therefore retains no definite shape, except that determined by the containing receptacle; a fluid.

Returning to the headwaters of this new album, Hollan Holmes, “I most often begin with a blank slate, no song idea, no melody, no nothing. It almost always starts with sound design. My main focus is a new and unique sound that inspires me. I use a variety of software synths and utilities and spend MANY hours experimenting until I find a sound or musical idea that I can’t ignore. From there, things begin to take on a life of their own and ideas will often come faster than I can capture them, but it’s that initial sound that is so important to the progression of ideas.

“I always have 5–10 songs in some state of progress. I never work on one song from start to finish. I like to step away from each song and let ideas come to fruition naturally, which also gives me the opportunity to come back to an idea with fresh ears and evaluate more objectively. I often find that ideas that I thought were great turn out to be not so much. Conversely, it isn’t unusual to unearth an old piece from prior years and fall immediately in love and finish it out.

“I tend to keep everything in the box (software-based) right now, since I’m currently extremely limited in studio space, restricting my ability to set up much hardware/outboard gear. My goal is a large space with all my hardware synths integrated, but that is still a few years away. However, I like to include a bit of hardware recording in much of my new work.”

Close your eyes and become immersed in the soundscapes and transported to another state of mind, a most potent and pure combination of perception altering collection of pieces of music thrilling to the senses. This is music with a logical purpose, and there is always a progression. There are infinite free wheeling electronic sounds but there is an overall tonal framework. The story of water is explored methodically and not simply pulled out of the aether. Each track expands upon a water theme.

Hydropower has been used since ancient times to grind flour and perform other tasks. The main sources of renewable electricity worldwide are wind power, hydroelectricity, and solar power. Hydropower is considered a more reliable source as long as water flows, while solar and wind are obviously variable renewable energy sources, because night always comes and sometimes the wind slows down. The first track is all about motion, with many things happening at once, creating a tapestry of powerful proud melodic punchy layers, calm on the surface but obviously very energetic below. The sound is a tight purposeful weave demonstrating sustainable energy in motion: “Hydroelectric” (6:10). Hydroelectricity, or hydroelectric power, is electricity produced from hydropower.

Hell or High Water is a 2016 American neo-Western crime film, a moral drama that takes the measure of each destabilizing action as it shows us the spirit of American gun culture from the inside out. Emerald Water’s second track, “Hell or High Water” (6:47) probably also takes place in West Texas, building into increasing drama, first as undertones then its punchy resolving into free fall towards the end of the track. The song title makes me think there will be violence, what I hear is a peaceful and complicated fabric of tones and tempos, building to the gentle emergence of cycling melodic fragments, which obliquely nods to the notion of the grittiness and sprawl of West Texas. A trickle turns into a flow, lights dancing on the ceiling, reflected from the moving water at mid-day, building peacefully and then resting. A sparkle turns into a beam, but there are no gunfights or dramatic bank robberies leading to pursuit by two Texas Rangers.

Shorelines are the interface between water and land. They are the fragile and beautiful ties that bind these elements together, a cradle of creation, sustainer of species, and place of peace. Ribbons of life, where land, water, and air meet, are certainly worthy of protection. “A Ribbon of Life” (6:00) features a bouncy interplay, tonal contrasts in complicated sweeping liquid structures that build as layers gather, melodic forms wiggle and dance, which resolve into some interesting little creaky sounds at the end.

Taking place in a fantasy world, “Tales from the Abyss” (7:15) evokes a future for the world for thousands of years to come. Listening, in my mind, we are thrown into a valley none of us are familiar with. With hyperresonance and a rich tapestry of sound, we explore a wide sonic landscape. I hear a deep container filled with dark water, the feeling increases in expanse and darkness while the water boils on the surface. Not boiling with heat but with power, rolling and tumbling motion then sinking into the calm depths, resolving into tidal surges and crashing surf reaching a melodic reflected light gentle finish.

“The River” (5:57) is a journey. The sound is of tireless strength and ancient presence. As the day progresses so does the activity, this is a working river, not aimlessly drifting. It’s not easy to save a river, to ensure the river’s clean, clear waters will continue to flow according to their historical and natural regimes for generations to come. Water rights issues, land fragmentation, and the careless industrial development along the shores threatens the existence of the world’s rivers. Rivers have always meant geographical connections and furnished a means of transportation as well as fish for sustenance and liquid for refreshment. Sitting by the river one might ponder weighty conclusions about this gateway to a lot of the future, feeling the hope and the hardness and coldness of being alone.

He yelled for help. He went up and down a few more times before he was not seen resurfacing. He was swimming across the river and was approximately halfway, when he began to go under the water’s surface, and was said to have been taken by the current and not seen again. “Taken by the Current” (7:46) begins with the sparkling surface, a piano and electricity in the mix, you feel a building depth, then you realize you are caught up in the flow and allow it to keep you in its grasp. Hidden darkness emerges and prevails, the water reaches for the swimmer and holds on, captivating and charming them to sink into blissful oblivion, an imaginary electronic natant piano joins this soundscape of thermohaline circulation.

With a choral glow, “The Sublime Shimmer” (5:28) brings a sense of divine depth and layered cloths of light perceptible above the surface of the water. Consider “shiver” and “shimmer” as two kinds of emotional responses to music, with “shiver” defined as a sensate surface aesthetic, considered subordinate to “shimmer,” a meditational state aspiring to the condition of musical spirituality. The sun glint creates spectacular effects, light on the wind rippled surface of the water, as if the surface of water is somehow dancing, the sound of glitter patterns that are a moving and changing phenomenon, hear choral light pillars.

“Changing Course” (8:00) employs a multitude of imagined orchestral harps and horns, the feeling of planetary vorticity, massive oceanic gyres and towering clouds above, allowing us to see patterns of circulation and motion, the world is alive and flowing, its warp is necessary, the free will of life itself, this motion is caused by differences in density and temperature. This takes place underwater, with large currents and gyres, the size is huge. The feeling is deeper and slower, summoning a sense of swelling and motion with sparkling edges.

As a term for sea monster, Leviathan brings to mind a demonic sea serpent noted in theology and mythology, and has also been used to refer to great whales in particular. The body of the Leviathan, especially his eyes, possesses great illuminating power. Leviathan is a name for the sea-monster, with Behemoth the land-monster and Ziz the air-monster. From the early 17th century Leviathan has also been used to refer to overwhelmingly powerful people or things. “Leviathan” (7:49) begins with bubbly sounds which precede an energetic pulse, and sustain at a rapid pace with great strength and power, visualize large aquatic creatures, a cetatean presence moving quickly through the vast darkness, occasionally rising to break through and spout, bubbles and motion lost in the background, alone in the immense sea to hunt for meals of brit and squid.

Most modern nautical charts indicate depth in meters. However, the U.S. Hydrographic Office uses feet and fathoms. Some extensive flat areas of the sea bottom with constant depth are known by their fathom number, like the Broad Fourteens or the Long Forties, both in the North Sea. To measure the depth of shallow waters, boatmen once used a sounding line containing fathom points, some marked and others in between, called deeps, unmarked but estimated by the user. A fathom is a unit of length in the imperial and the U.S. customary systems equal to 6 feet (1.8288 m), used especially for measuring the depth of water. “Fathom” (7:44) exhibits tight construction as it takes us down and down into the dark open sea.

Water that moves does not require an engine, it is often powered by gravity. Think of water bounding, running and cascading with layers of kinetic energy. The closer and title track, “Emerald Waters” (5:45), celebrates the endless options for modes of exploration and simple wonderment.

Emerald Waters, the album, is uplifting, contemplative and emotionally moving. The story is of transcendentalism, moving beyond the corrupted and polluted state of the water left us by the industrialists, and moving into a return to natural purity. Eternally, rain and snow, precipitated by the clouds, give birth to the rivers that carry their waters to the sea. In that way a continual current is affected which, starting from the sea, returns to the sea, after having traveled through the atmosphere in the form of clouds, watered the earth as rain, and crossed continents as rivers.

“I try to create a rich tapestry of sound that represents a wide sonic landscape. There are very subtle sounds throughout my work that many people may not notice, but they are essential to the final creation. One thing that is NOT obvious to listeners is the sheer amount of work that goes into creating the songs that I release, because for every successful song that gets published, I have ten more that will never see the light of day. Hundreds and hundreds of ideas are explored from which I cull the very few I’m willing to share. It’s embarrassing how awful some of my experiments truly are.”

“This album was deeply inspired by the natural world around me, but there is one event in particular that was the impetus for this project. I was 16 and traveling through West Texas with my father. We were driving through Del Rio, Texas, when we passed over a creek. The water was gin clear and possessed all the colors of the blue and green spectrum. It was overwhelmingly beautiful. That ten seconds stuck with me my entire life. It had a profound impact on my appreciation for the beauty of water and its place in the natural world. I traveled back to Del Rio and filmed that creek, and two others, for the music video for the song, “Emerald Waters”. The landscape paintings by Texas artist, David Caton, were a huge inspiration, as well.”

Emerald Waters has been dedicated to The Devils River Conservancy (DRC), which is a community of advocates dedicated to treasure, preserve and protect the Devils River, its springs, and the lands within its water catchment area.

Originally published at https://ello.co.