Genesis, Vol. X — The Reckoning (Original Score)

Drawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is Genesis 42 through 47: 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.

Side A tightens, and we wanted it to tighten like a screw — a quarter turn at a time, never slackening, for eight cues.

It starts with ten men going down a road they do not want to be on, because there is nothing to eat at home. What we pictured is a caravan setting out under duress rather than hope. Then a hall in a foreign country, a man they do not recognise sitting at the top of it, and an accusation they cannot answer. One brother left behind in chains. Silver found in a sack where no silver should be, on the road, in the dark, with days still to travel.

Everything on this side is being watched by someone who knows more than the people in the room. We were after the discomfort of that — being tested, and not being told that you are.

The middle of it is a meal. They are seated in birth order by a stranger who could not possibly know it, and served, and the youngest gets five times what anyone else does, and nobody says anything. We found that the most unnerving scene in the volume, and we scored it as hospitality with something underneath.

Then a cup in a sack, a road stopped, and a man stepping forward to offer himself in his brother's place — the longest speech in the book, and the point at which the screw finally strips.

Side B lets go all at once. A room cleared of everyone else. A man weeping so loudly the household hears it through the wall. I am Joseph. Wagons sent north loaded with everything a family will need to move, and an old man told his son is alive, and not believing it, and then seeing the carts.

The rest is a family walking to a new country in one long line, and being met on the road by someone who has run out to find them. The volume closes on that old man, at the end of his life, making his son swear not to bury him where they are standing.

We wanted the ending to look forward rather than rest — a promise about ground nobody on this record has seen yet.

Play it in order. It was built in order.

Composed by

Brian McGauley

Label

McGauley Records