Genesis, Vol. VIII — The Coat of Many Colors (Original Score)
rawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is Genesis 34 through 37: 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 darkest record we have made, and we decided early that nothing on it would be allowed to sound like a victory.
Side A begins in a town, with a young woman going out to see the women of the country, and it goes wrong immediately. What we pictured after that is a negotiation conducted in good faith on one side only — men agreeing to terms in a public place, a whole town persuaded, and three days of waiting while they are too sore to stand. Then two brothers with swords, going house to house.
We did not want any of that to be exciting. What we were reaching for is the flat, sick quiet of a plan working.
The rest of the side is burial. Strange gods gathered up and put under a tree. A nurse buried, and then a wife, dying on a road with a son in her arms and naming him for her own grief before someone else renames him. An old man gathered to his people by two sons who barely speak. And then a long list of the chiefs of a country that has nothing to do with any of this, which we imagined as centuries going past a window — flat, distant, and entirely unmoved.
Side B opens bright, and wrong. A boy in a coat his father should not have given him, telling his brothers a dream in which they bow to him, and then telling them a second one. We wanted that brightness to be uncomfortable rather than warm.
Everything after it is subtraction. A field, an errand, a long walk to Dothan, and figures seen coming from a distance by men who have time to decide what to do. A pit with no water in it. A meal eaten beside it. A caravan on the road to Egypt and a price agreed. A coat brought home in pieces and a father who will not be comforted by anyone, and says so, and means it.
The record does not resolve. It goes out on a road, with a boy who is now property, into a country the book has not shown us yet. We wanted the ending to feel like a page turning in the dark.
Play it in order. It was built in order.
- Composed by
- Brian McGauley
- Label
- McGauley Records