Genesis, Vol. XI — The Gathering (Original Score)

Drawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is Genesis 48 through 50: 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 last Genesis record, and almost all of it happens in one room.

Side A is a bed, an old man who cannot see well, and his sons brought in to hear what he has to say about them. It opens with two grandsons presented in the correct order and their grandfather crossing his hands anyway, and a father trying to correct him and being told no. We wanted that image — the deliberate wrong hand — to set the tone for everything after it.

Then they are called in together. What we pictured is not a ceremony but a summons: twelve men standing around a bed while one voice goes down the line. Some of them get tenderness. Two of them get something closer to a verdict, delivered without heat, decades after the thing they did. One gets more than any of them expected. Several get a sentence each and no more.

We were reaching, across the whole side, for the sound of a room where nobody interrupts. It is chamber-scaled on purpose. There is only one person speaking and everyone else is waiting to hear their own name.

Side B is the journey. He finishes speaking, gathers his feet into the bed, and that is the end of a book's worth of walking. Then a country that is not his own mourns him for seventy days, and the strangest procession in Genesis sets out — chariots and horsemen and the elders of Egypt going north, a foreign state escorting an old shepherd home.

They stop at a threshing floor and mourn again for seven days, and the people watching give the place a new name because of it.

After that, the brothers are frightened, and go to the one with power and offer to be his servants. What they get instead is the line the whole series has been walking towards, and we spent everything we had left on it.

The record does not end in Canaan. It ends with a promise about it — an oath about carrying bones out of a country the family has settled into, made to people who will not be alive to keep it, and then a coffin, in Egypt. We wanted the last thing you hear to be unfinished on purpose.

Play it in order. It was built in order.

Composed by

Brian McGauley

Label

McGauley Records