Restoration work
May 4, 2015
A paragraph from David Brazier in Tricycle caught my eye:
“And what does that honest looking come up with? What trophies does it glean from the seabed and haul to the surface? Ancient amphoras. The broken pots of our earlier strivings. Shards of self-seeking in myriad forms, now strewn across the bottom of our ocean. Fragments of all the empires we have sought to build, the wars we have fought, the pride and dejection our ego has suffered.”
Strong words, and they could form a serviceable introduction to this blog. Anyway, I was recovering files from a backup hard drive and found this old Uffmoor Woods Music Club song, ‘Ulysses’.
Actually it was titled ‘Great Voyages of the Classical Hero’ in its original version and was recorded in 2008 (probably). That was deleted during a recent bout of overzealous digital house cleaning. To piece this particular amphora back together, I went back to the master recordings, fixed some mixing errors and added a NES synth to replace a bass line that had gone wrong. The violin sounds are a Gibson Flying V played with a bow.
There are a few more amphorae down there in the murk, of that I’m sure. I doubt Brazier would recommend piecing together the salvage but they’ll probably wash up sooner or later. Perhaps their value lies in showing that all of our projects are provisional and time-bound. Digital amphorae rupture too, more frequently than their physical counterparts. And they are useless for storing wine in.
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