Exodus, Vol. I — The Bondage and the Deliverer (Original Score)

Drawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is Exodus 1 through 4: sixteen instrumental cues meant to be playing while you read it. Not a setting of the words, and not one cue per passage — each takes whatever span it needs to hold the thing we saw when we read it.

This is the first Exodus record, and it begins with a sentence about a king who did not know a name. Everything that follows comes out of that forgetting.

Side A is a country closing. It opens on a people counted as a threat and put to work, and it narrows from there — brick, then a quota, then an order given to midwives, then an order given to everyone. Two women refuse and are not punished. A mother builds a small waterproof box and puts her son in the river the order named, which is obedience and defiance in the same motion. He is pulled out by the daughter of the man who signed it and raised in that house. Grown, he kills a man and looks both ways first, and the looking is the part we kept coming back to. He runs, and the side ends at a well in another country with a stranger drawing water for someone else's flock.

Side B is a bush that burns and does not burn out. A man turns aside to look at something ordinary that is behaving wrongly, and he is still holding a stick when he is told to take off his shoes. What follows is one of the strangest conversations in the book: he is given a job and spends most of it declining. He asks who is sending him and gets a name that refuses to sit still. He asks what if they do not believe him and is shown a stick that becomes a snake and a hand that goes white and comes back. He says he is not a good speaker and is told who made mouths. He says send someone else, and the reply is anger and a brother already walking toward him.

We wanted the record to hold that reluctance rather than rush past it. The man at the bush is not eager, and the text does not pretend he is.

It ends badly and then quietly. There is a night on the road that almost nobody explains well, blood and a flint and a wife acting fast, and then a return, and a people bowing their heads when they hear that someone has noticed them. That bow is the first warm thing in four chapters. It is not deliverance. It is the news that deliverance has started, offered to people still standing in the brickyard.

Play it in order. It was built in order.

Composed by

Brian McGauley

Label

McGauley Records