Genesis, Vol. VII — The Wrestling (Original Score)

Drawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is Genesis 29 through 33: 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.

What we saw first was heat. A well in open country at midday, covered with a stone, flocks crowded around it waiting for someone strong enough or willing enough to move it. A man arrives off a long road and moves it, and everything that follows in this volume is set in motion in that one afternoon.

Then years. We wanted Side A to feel like time passing at the wrong speed — seven years agreed to and gone in a sentence, then a wedding night by lamplight and a morning that shows you the wrong face, and then another seven. A household of two sisters and their maids, children arriving and being named for what their mothers are still waiting to receive. We were reaching for the ordinary weight of that: not a scandal, just years of it, a house where everyone is counting and no one says so.

Side B empties out. We imagined a camp being loaded in the dark, a pursuit across country, a heap of stones raised on a hillside as a border between two men who will not meet again. Then the company divided on open ground, gifts sent on ahead, one group after another crossing a river at dusk until there is nobody left on the near bank.

And then a night we could not stop picturing: a river crossing in the dark, two figures, and no light on either of them until dawn. What we wanted from the centre of Side B is that specific quality of a night that will not end and does not explain itself, and of the walk away from it at first light, changed and not intact.

The last thing is dust on a horizon. Four hundred men coming, twenty years of expecting the worst — and a brother running out ahead of them. That is the image the whole volume is aimed at, and we saved everything we had for it.

Play it in order. It was built in order.

Composed by

Brian McGauley

Label

McGauley Records