I’ve enjoyed reading science fiction and watching it on film and television for a long time. While I was in high school, I even wrote some sci-fi and fantasy stories, but I set that part of my creative life aside when I went to college and spent more and more time on my music.
For years, I wanted to get back to my fiction writing, but I never seemed to have time, and I always lacked inspiration. Then about two years ago, the outline of an entire science fiction novel materialized in my head one morning. I began writing that evening, and I rapidly drafted about half of the outlined project.
In the last few weeks, I had the idea of recording several portions of the novel to create something like a “book on tape” that I could add to the media section of my website. Furthermore, I decided I would try to prepare an underscore for the recordings. I had originally thought I would write something relatively traditional, but a few days ago I had a completely new idea that seemed to better fit the nature of the first part of the text that I had decided to record. The result is an experimental underscore using (mostly) naturally occurring sounds that I generated and then pieced together, thus echoing mid-century “musique concrete”.
The portion of the text that I have recorded first is intentionally peculiar. My goal was to create a passage that was not character driven at all but instead described an unfamiliar landscape in a highly objective, impartial manner that was nevertheless contained within an abstract formal pattern.
As always, I welcome your thoughts.
“Interlude Number” by Stan Pelkey.
Musical sounds generated by Stan Pelkey (June 20–23, 2016). Underscore composed by Stan Pelkey (June 23, 2016). Read by the author.
