Genesis, Vol. II — The Grief / The Water (Original Score)

Drawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is Genesis 4 through 9 as a score: sixteen instrumental cues written to be played while the chapters are read. Each one takes the span the music asks for — some carry a chapter, one carries four verses nobody has ever explained.

You do not need the first volume to start here, though this one picks up exactly where that one stopped — on the far side of a door that will not open. Open to chapter four, start the record, and let the music keep the pace. Every cue is named for the passage it belongs to.

Side A is grief, and it is the harder of the two. It begins with two brothers and an altar and ends with a man measuring wood. In between the text does something strange and worth listening for: it keeps building. Cain leaves and founds a city. His line invents the harp and the forge. The generations of Adam run for a whole chapter and every one of them dies. Human beings get better at everything except the one thing, and by chapter six the sentence that lands is not that God is angry — it is that God is sorry. The cue for that is the quietest thing on this record.

Side B is water, and it moves in one direction and then reverses. The flood arrives from below before it arrives from above, which is the order the text gives and the order the music takes. Then the long middle where nothing happens but waiting, a raven that does not come back and a dove that does, ground that dries by inches. It ends on a covenant hung in the sky — a weapon set down, pointed away.

Grief first, then water, then a promise. Play it in order. It was built in order.

Composed by

Brian McGauley

Label

McGauley Records

UPC

701546217104