New Sounds by Music Pioneers Deborah Martin & Jill Haley
https://orcd.co/the-silence-of-grace
https://spottedpeccary.com/shop/the-silence-of-grace/
Electronic and acoustic instrumental music of inspirational calm and great beauty. The Silence of Grace combines the electronic music of Deborah Martin with Jill Haley’s oboe and English horn. There’s something very magical about the serenity of nature, and Jill has connected her music with the spirit of the wilderness. Deborah Martin’s passion is to visualize and create music that takes each listener on a journey through time and space. Each track contains the synergy of the woodwinds and electronics, interpreting the peace that can be experienced in natural settings, such as forests, parks and by waterways.
This flowing and beautiful soundscape is filled with opportunities for adventure. The music I hear on this album represents to me the adoration of the Earth, seeking an understanding of natural phenomena, and finding commonalities between all living things, things that are best studied as a whole. Seeking to understand how the world and universe around us works. This laboratory is alive. Jill brings the light while Deborah brings the love of mystery, and the combination of these two amazing musicians (stargazers, ambassadors from another time) is magical to behold.
Grace has confidence. Nature sometimes has a way of slowing life down, presenting a complicated system of causes, allowing the inquisitive to discover common patterns. Mother Earth has her own agenda, perhaps seen in the beautiful nighttime and early morning light. "The Silence of Grace" (6:54) is filled with passion, dreams, and magic, recalling spacious skies and mountain majesties, expressing theories of divine natural forms, there is almost nothing to compare to it.
Hues change by time of day and season, wrinkles in the earth’s crust are actually mountains that wear the dawn like "Indian Heaven" (6:52), revealing an immensely intense feeling of a state of love, peace and joy, celestial electronics and deep confident cadences, hand percussion and a quiet reverence for the mysteries of life and death.
Rugged and remote, "Verdant Sanctuary" (5:01) invites the listener to meander further into the wilderness, to discover ancient trees and dramatic cave formations which appear with mirage-like effects. I hear chimes and swirling electronics joined with an oboe to create a tone poem, describing a forest filled with life, a vast roadless wilderness. Hidden seeds contain future forms, which are responsible for the reproduction and growth of succeeding life forms, listen to the tiny DNA ribbons of color. Our sacred earth sometimes begets butterflies!
The wild character of these sound regions is due, in part, to their sheer size. The water continues to flow, solitude is one of the many assets held in the woodlands. Allow yourself to be mesmerized by the greenest mountains, and the flora and fauna found in the ground and the water, a gaunt beauty and place of profound quiet. "The Stillness of Forest Bathing" (6:20) is expressed with the sound of cosmic radiation that gives way to the calm glory of solitary interaction with nature, providing the spirits of the land a chance to shine their light directly on you.
Fog lies like a soft white blanket on the indescribable ghostliness, hundreds of miles of pure snow-covered rocks and virgin lakes and high timber. Find yourself in a stunning place, a place buffered from change, and give yourself a reminder that you are a part of this magical world. "Fountains" (6:06) bring tingling droplets of water in motion lifted by complex layers of weaving instruments and air, filled with cascading melodic breezes.
The beauty that surrounds the Earth is both grand and subtle, come to the edge and look outward, explore with your ears a different walking path today, seek out that rugged vista, the river and its tributaries, and the wind calling, feeling as if you have found the very edge of the world, embarking on adventures that no one has before. "Earth Stone Water Sky" (4:06) evokes the beauty of the calm water, the light on the mountains, and mysterious elements containing light, whispers, and time.
The whole valley, as far as the eye can reach, is full of trails of smoke, curling up from its fissured floor. What I hear is a hot pulsing didgeridoo, a primitive dancing engine, joined by hand percussion as the woodwind breezes swirl overhead, electronics flow throughout until they transform into ascending spirits that trickle down as gentle droplets, almost like rain. It seems as if time has dropped away a million years and we are back in a primordial world, in the pouring rain, "From Fire Into Water" (6:36).
Time is a river flowing beyond the reach of the quietus, preserving the wild beauty and deep history that extends over the reach of humans, with perpetual cycles of precipitation, evaporation, run off, and infiltration. Water is like many mobile beings, bodies in motion, rising into the air to peacefully soar on the wind in a frolic. "Water Flows of Clouds and Thunder" (7:32) depicts dark winds gathering power, and then becomes a sparkling celebration of motion, as a delicate harp emerges to join the airborne dance. What I hear gives me an indescribable sense of a mysterious elsewhere, a vivid glow that illuminates the clouds and its plume, revealing a cloud-cloaked landscape, hanging pinnacled in midheaven, sometimes you can’t really see it clearly while you are there. The beauty is, in its starkness, something that seems worlds away. Humans and nature have lived together for thousands and thousands of years. Each natural object was carefully placed as if Mother Nature had a specific outcome in mind. A safe place is where someone can feel relaxed and find peace.
Deborah Martin is known for her mastery of subtlety and the essence of understatement, creating richly textured and highly emotive musical sojourns that always takes the listener on a journey. Some of her recent works include Hemispherica Portalis (a collaboration with Dean De Benedictis); Eye Of The Wizard; Under The Moon; Deep Roots, Hidden Water; Between Worlds (a collaboration with Erik Wøllo); Anno Domini (a collaboration with J. Arif Verner); Tibet (a collaboration with Madhavi Devi); and Ancient Power (a collaboration with Steve Gordon).
Jill Haley is an oboist, English horn player, pianist and composer who visits National Parks in the United States, often as an Artist in Residence, and composes music about the Park while living there. Some of these parks include Montana’s Glacier National Park; Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado; Badlands National Park, South Dakota; Wrangell/St. Elias National Park, Alaska; Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico; and Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida. Her catalog includes The Canyons and Mesas of Bandelier, The Winds of Badlands, Zion and Bryce Canyon Soundscapes, Glacier Soundscapes, The Waters of Glacier, Mesa Verde Soundscapes, and National Park Soundscapes.
1 The Silence of Grace
2 Indian Heaven
3 Verdant Sanctuary
4 The Stillness of Forest Bathing
5 Fountains
6 Earth Stone Water Sky
7 From Fire Into Water
8 Water Flows of Clouds and Thunder
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