Genesis, Vol. IX — The Pit and the Palace (Original Score)
rawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is Genesis 38 through 41: 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.
The record goes all the way down before it goes anywhere else, and we built both halves to be the same shape upside down.
Side A opens away from the main story, in a smaller and dustier place: a man who leaves his brothers, a household, sons who die, and a widow left waiting for a promise nobody intends to keep. What we pictured is a tent rather than a hall — close, dry, nothing echoing. Then a woman sitting veiled by a road at sheep-shearing time, and a transaction, and three months later a sentence passed on her by the one person least entitled to pass it. She produces the evidence in public. We wanted that moment to land without any noise at all.
Then the descent proper. A young man doing well in a foreign house, trusted with everything in it. A door, a hand, a garment left behind and carried to a husband as proof of the opposite of what happened. And then walls: a prison, and a man who was good at everything finding himself somewhere none of it counts.
We were reaching, on this side, for narrowing. Each image is a smaller room than the one before.
Side B turns that around and takes it back up, slowly, in exactly the same steps. Two servants with troubled faces in the same cell. Dreams read correctly. A promise to remember him, and two more years of being forgotten anyway — that gap is the hinge of the whole record and we let it sit.
Then a summons, a shave and a change of clothes, and a young man standing in front of the most powerful person in the world saying it is not in me. Seven fat years and seven lean ones. Storehouses filling all summer, grain past counting, a country organised against a famine it cannot yet feel.
It ends with the whole earth coming to one man's door for bread. We wanted that to feel less like triumph than like weather — enormous, impersonal, and arriving on schedule.
Play it in order. It was built in order.
- Composed by
- Brian McGauley
- Label
- McGauley Records