LARGE SLOW RIVER by K.I.A. feat. Janet Cardiff

Large Slow River is an epic song by K.I.A. on the “Sonorous Susurrus” release, from the uptempo portion of the 22 song release. It is a long EDM or IDM electronic song which samples the audio installation artwork “A Large Slow River” by Janet Cardiff. The song incorporates the lyrics, and some of the sounds in the artwork (i.e. footsteps to create the beat) as well as portions of the words from the sampled artwork to create a song about the meaning of reality, interpretations of what is memory, imagined, or experienced.

The original audio artwork is “an audio walk made specifically for the Oakville Galleries' Gairloch Gardens. Fleming's curatorial essay focuses on spatial and temporal aspects of the piece. Her analysis of relations between fiction, reality and the virtual within Cardiff's work foregrounds the symbiotic relationship between sound and vision.”

Hear the song:

Large Slow River by K.I.A. on SPOTIFY: LINK

Large Slow River by K.I.A. on ITUNES: LINK

LYRICS:

beginning):
the future
it's such a strange place...

(ending)
there's so many moments that we forget about
it's like we're underwater for most of our lives
and we only come up for air
once in a while

Song Story (early writing on the song):

My one and only own foray into spoken-word-over-music realm is the song "Large Slow River" from the "Sonorous Susurrus" CD by K.I.A., where I use (an officially approved) sample of the sound artwork "A Large Slow River" by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. More on it in a moment.

Spoken word is so tricky-- it often comes off as pretentious/artsy/faux-poetic, boring, or worse, in some cases, funny. Good funny is bad; it's like a joke, and once you get it, why hear it again? (Never understood why people buy comedy albums, however brilliant, for this reason.) Bad funny is bad, because... well, that's self-explanatory.There are so many examples of bad spoke-word-over-music, from the William Shatner stuff (bad funny) to the tracks on the "Dead City Radio" CD by William Burroughs to "Fire Coming Out Of the Monkey's Head" by Gorillaz, and I think even Leonard Cohen ventures into it a few times... and certainly the vast amount of music that samples film dialogue at length (Star Trek, Apocalypse Now, Scarface...yawn.)

Of course, there are some exemplary examples of spoken word too: Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" (not rap, not yet, it's only 1970, but you can see where it's going) and... um, are there any others? Oh yeah, "Little Fluffy Clouds" by the Orb from "The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld" CD.

So anyway... "Large Slow River". Janet Cardiff is a Canadian sound-installation artist. She has done a series of walking audio tours where you place on headphones and listen to the sound installation (which is her talking about what you're seeing, what she saw, memories, surrounding sounds, her footsteps, etc.) as you follow the path she originally took. It's binaurally recorded, so the sounds have a 3D effect and sound very 'real' (unlike stereo, which is only left-right.) So the reality of what you are hearing is the same, but different, from what you are actually experiencing... it's like an overlay from another time or dimension.

In the case of "A Large Slow River", a piece that starts in a gallery and moves you outside through a garden, for example, there's a moment when you hear a jet overhead... a very common sound in any urban enviroment, but in the context of the art-piece it forces you to wonder if it really is overhead or just in the recording... and this particular piece also deals with time, as it has splices of an 'earlier' recording in it; so you're not only moving along in 3-D as you walk, you're moving through the same space in a few different time realities... to me though, what elevates this piece is that the writing is so good that it actually is emotionally moving. (See previous post on "John Lilly" by Laurie Anderson)I was working on this long (dare I say 'epic') track that evolves significantly from beginning to end, and that was sort of in the IDM (intelligent dance music) genre but not quite, and the song needed something to lift it... I came across Large Slow River, started to use pieces of it and it was perfect lyrically: "I wander through the house" fit in with the house beats; "Time travels around me like a large slow river", "turn to the left" and "turn to the right" were great to use with some interesting panning effects; her footsteps I used as a syncopatic drum pattern (something I'd already done with the song 'Freedom', also on 'Sonorous Sururrus'); hell, I was even able to use the lyric "the bridge" for my musical bridge and 'stop' to drop out the beats...anyway, the result is the song does take you on a journey musically and lyrically (yes that old cliche but hopefully a little cooler,) ending on the line "...there are so many moments that we forget about, it's like we're underwater most of our lives, and we only come up for air every once in awhile"