the pad
cd, 58:21 min., cardboard-cover, 300 copies
|
mp3s |
cds |
artists |
links |
contact |
produced, written, arranged and performed on guitar, piano, synthesizer, percussion and voice by the pad. mastering by cookie marenco/otr studios.
take it away / the pad / hanging upside down on a train (featuring HazelEye) / twinkle / prelude / beautiful delusion / babycakes / all i want is you / welcome to my world
Welcome To My World is an audio exploration of Earth. Representing more than 4 billion years of sound, it includes field recordings of various species of bird, warm-blooded vertebrate animals that,
descended from the dinosaurs of the Jurassic period, have inhabited our planet for approximately 145 million years. The cry of an injured baby seal, separated
from its mother, represents a despair that has sought solace for more than 20 million years. Wordless tones of the human voice have carried messages of desire,
rejection, anger, joy, hope, acceptance, dominance, resistance, satisfaction, disappointment, deceit and resignation for 200 thousand years.
The first guitar-like instruments appeared 4000 years ago, the cello 350 years ago and the bass clarinet 250 years ago.
Electronic music, however, is a relatively new phenomenon, with the first signs of development in the late 1800s. Its grandchild, the still embryonic digital
technologies of this century, allowed the bass clarinet and cello to be performed in Munich, Germany, deconstructed, transformed into numbers and sent over the
Internet to me in California, U.S.A., where, a few minutes later, they arrived to be reconstructed and edited. Yet the circular codependency, and ultimately
irrelevant distinction, between time and space, becomes ever more apparent as the electronically-processed echo of a modern acoustic guitar, made of Rosewood
from Brazil and Spruce from the Adirondack mountains of the United States, simulates the wind that ruled our planet far in advance of any life form and, when
it chooses, continues to demonstrate (as in Hurricane Katrina) an ability to dominate at will. The cello mimics birdsong and the bass clarinet alternately
becomes a buzzing bee, scurrying rodent, slinking python, roaring lion and screaming mastodon sending an evolutionary message to nearly extinct descendants.
The guitar’s mono-toned bass string is electronically transformed into the rumbling earthquake that causes Tsunamis, swallows civilizations and strikes innately
realized fear into the hearts of all creatures. How, in the face of these realities, do past, present and future differentiate?
Welcome to My World is spoken in a universal language of sound. It can be understood in all corners of Earth by literate and illiterate, human and nonhuman
species. A story for, and of, all that inhabit our planet, there is curiosity, discovery, peace, dissonance, and beauty. It is a message from me to
you, and from us to them, wherever they exist, throughout the Universe.
Gene Bryan Johnson (The Pad), 2009, Planet Earth