Final: Time Mapping Choir

This project came to me through various ways over the course of a few months span of time, it only took a few interesting concepts to be woven together into one succinct medium for things to really seem right. I had found this wonderful old gospel recording of this woman in the fall while I was on tour and instantly knew I needed to do something with it, at that time I wasn't quite sure if I would sample it or cover the song in its entirety. After that one of my good friend's Grandmother passed away, watching her go through that was very intense. I soon realized I had the exact same relationship with my Grandmother that she did, she was like my mother. This sudden realization of death and urgency to preserve more of my Grandmother was something that beat at the heart of this project. I wanted to make a choir for a long time and record it, so I came up with the idea of using the repeated line from the gospel song I found as the lyrics for this new choir I was going to assemble. I thought the only way I could get my Grandma to sing on a song of mine would be if there were a lot of other people singing with her just for the fact that she had made it known she will only ever sing in church as she believes she is not the best of singers. So the goal then became clear, I needed to set out in search of the friends and loved ones in my life that could sing and collect their voices for the choir. It was a beautiful process to see come into fruition as I was so lucky to be able to hear all these voices of the people I love all put together overlapping in one space for me to play back over and over. It was like recording little special parts of their soul and keeping them for myself. Every time I would go and record someone, a lot of memories would flood in as to how I knew them and how we met. The recording aspects were a bit difficult as I didn't do the proper way of recording everyone in one room all at once, I was going around to their houses and recording them. This proved to be an issue I had to work on in post-production dealing with acoustics and the timbre of the room sounds. I plan on continuing to recruit more voices into the choir, this song will be going on the new record I am writing now and I plan on giving this particular track a lot of love and time to assess over the next year. I have an idea for a gallery exhibition of this project when it is perhaps finished, I think it might be nice to separate the voices and have them playing from different parts of the room of the gallery. Then the gallery would be decorated with some drawings and photos of my Grandmother. This was definitely a really fulfilling process and I can't wait for the finished product, but it also has this underlying notion that we all are never done building our choirs of loved ones, we are always introducing new people into our lives.