the brief
one of the most literary karosongs, a bitter yet poetic condemnation of our current environmental folly from its future survivors
Towards the end of the second phase, after seven asynchronous collaborations with Yanni and two with Robert Haig Coxon, I began browsing music sites for other instrumental artists. To see if I could find a similar connection, a new (albeit unwitting) collaborator.
I found several that tickled my spidey song sense, including Kitaro and Govi. And songs from both ended up on my youtube 'maybes' playlist as I moved into the third phase, including a live version of Silk Road by Kitaro.
It was a song that kept calling my name, but didn't properly introduce itself until mid-September 2017, when I got the title and a sense the song would be about a grand journey across a desert. An adventure. Even the opening lyrics came.
the old silk road is a long lonely trail
a peril-filled trek through lands of dust, ruin,
where you can trust no one — nothing —
but your own wits
It was the 28th karosong to start channeling, the 5th in the 3.1 set. It would take almost two years to complete. The next four songs would all start and finish before this one was done.
Much of the first year was spent just listening, trying to figure out the song's structure, work out how many verses there were or if there was even a chorus. But I couldn't because Kitaro's music was just a wall of mostly indistinguishable sound to my ears. (See Postscript)
Yet, as that went on, I did get glimpses of the lyrics, glimmers of the powerful emotions behind them. An overall sense of the song began building. It was not an adventure. It was from the future, a warning from a survivor of the environmental catastrophes that we in our time are unleashing every day.
At first I thought it would be a warning to us in our time. It wasn't. It was a warning to their own time not to be like us, a warning they coded into oral tales dispersed across vast distances by traveling story tellers.
they are history
they are the history we suffer daily
the history we bear in the misery of our lives
on this blighted barren world
the history of a monumental crime
letting unbridled greed run the world while letting
denial and deception destroy the threads of life
even long after they knew better
By then, I'd figured out this was another eco/poli-flavour karosong, the 4th of these to channel. Lyrics probably mostly spokesong style. The toughest message yet. It would not be an easy song to channel.
Part of me wanted to avoid it, but that never works for long. And the bits and pieces of the lyrics I'd got had built up a partial map of the storyline across the song's verses. It was going to be a complex portrait of a time, a people and a person, looking back on a time they called "the before". Literary. As much a poem as a song. There was even a reference to a favourite poem, Ozymandias by Percy Byshe Shelley.
yes you can still find ruins from the before out here
but they built for the short term and so little
actually remains 'round about
"yay look on their works,
they who thought they were so mighty. . ."
But it was all a bit like Plato's cave dwellers watching the shadows on the wall. They could see the shadows but they had no framework for understanding what they were seeing. Without the framework of the song's structure, I couldn't fit the lyrics together.
surprised I can paraphrase Shelley?
we are not uncivilized
we kept what we could, what we valued,
discarded the useless, the trivial, and
turned our backs on the ozymandeans
who thought their empty lives so important
and deserved filling no matter what
homo sapiens they called themselves . . .
hah! homo stupiens!
I finally 'got' the structure of the music, 6 verses, no chorus, and began the usual karosong slog. Weeks and months of singing the song over and over. Fitting the lyrics I had into the instrumental verses, then filling them out as more came. Processing the emotions behind the lyrics. Anger. Bitterness. Hopelessness. The slog never stopped being hard.
yes there are times my anger boils over
how dare they destroy our futures!
how dare they destroy so much
with so little thought
in pursuit of so little value!
what fools they were to have so knowingly,
so willingly sold their descendents into this . . .
There were numerous realizations along the way. Too many to describe, even in an archive of record such as this. One that deserves inclusion came late in the process, when I realized that this song had been predicted in an earlier one.
At the end of Away is no longer there 2.3, there was a line that came as almost an afterthought, and that I thought was just a nice bit of rhetoric. After exhorting that we must "occupy the future" and "face the facts", the song concluded with a warning "or be forever remembered and cursed for our shortsighted lives."
Along the old Silk Road 3.1 was exactly that curse.
no we don't honour our ancestors. why would we?
we spit on their memory and with these stories
maintain their memory just to spit on it longer . . .
to be our ozymandias in the barren
our reminder who we must not be
Post-script
I really only came to understand my difficulty with Silk Road's musical structure much later, when I saw that I don't connect to an asynchronous instrumental track through either the beat or the melody. I connect through the lead instrument and, once I've locked into it, it pulls me through the song like a boat towing a waterskier.
Piano and guitar are usually easy lead instruments to lock into. They tend to be discrete and precise. But sweeping strings and keyboards like those in Silk Road, or swelling crescendos like those in Got to get back 3.1 elude me.
Until I finally 'get' them.
the lyrics
. . . opening credits
Along the old Silk Road
a 3.1 karosong
and asynchronous collaboration with
Kitaro's own Silk Road
if this letter doesn't get through
then i am already dead
if it does i am talking to you all
— 1 —
the old silk road is a long lonely trail
a peril-filled trek through lands of dust, ruin
where you can trust no one — nothing — just your own wits
they say the name comes from an ancient ancient trading route
from before the before even
but that's as likely just another tall tale
like so many of the others we hear out here
— 2 —
but not all tales from the before of greed, waste
and unimaginable comfort none of us has ever seen
are tall tales
they are history
they are the history we suffer daily
the history we bear in the misery of our lives
on this blighted barren world
the history of a monumental crime
letting unbridled greed run the world while letting
denial and deception destroy the threads of life
even long after they knew better
. . . short bridge upI am a Speaker, a guardian of that history
my brethren and i travel these ancient roads
spreading these tales, keeping this history alive,
a warning for the future in a condemnation of the past
— 3 —
yes, you can still find ruins
from the before out here
but they built for the short term
so little actually remains round about
yay look on their works,
they who thought they were so mighty. . .
surprised I can paraphrase Shelley?
we are not uncivilized
we kept what we could, what we valued
discarded the useless, the trivial, and
turned our backs on the ozymandeans
who thought their empty lives so important
and deserved filling no matter what
homo sapiens they called themselves. . .
hah! homo stupiens!
— 4 —
their fatal flaw was they believed their own stories,
they saw themselves separate, apart from the life force and
world that created and sustained them
it's a mistake we cannot afford
we have learned to survive in a denuded world
in those pockets where useful life holds on
where the future remains a distant country
we must rebuild even the possibility of bit by bit
where we remember the past in order to secure the present
and where we never forget we are children of the dust
. . . not star dust . . .
earth dust
— 5 —
yes there are times my anger boils over
how dare they destroy our futures!
how dare they destroy so much
with so little thought
in pursuit of so little value!
what fools they were to have so knowingly,
so willingly sold their descendents into this. . .
and then i see we are still the same fools,
still crazy after all these years
and i see that greed can trick us again,
make us believe it can be trusted
but it can't
it only has one end
and we are already living in those end times
— 6 —
no we don't honour our ancestors. why would we?
we spit on their memory and with these stories
maintain their memory just to spit on it longer …
to be our ozymandias in the barren
our reminder who we must not be
now you know why i travel these ancient roads
but my limbs begin to fail, my body wearies of the burden
so now I stay along the old Silk Road and
send letters in my stead, sending out the stories
in the hope they survive me
the vault
All of the 3.1 songs started during the 2017/2018 period when I had stopped daily recording and my recording gear was put into storage. They all started being recorded in spring 2019.
Along the old Silk Road was both the longest karosong to that point, and took the longest time to channel of the 3.1 set.
arc01 / first 'release' — July 19, 2019 [7]
arc03 / current — late August 2019 [7]
