ANCESTRAL TALES

With Erratics, I focused more on the sonic properties of David’s word choices, as well as the cyclical and surreal nature of the storytelling, in particular the way the individual words twist and turn in upon themselves. As with much of David’s work, the text is heavily mystical and metaphoric in nature. The text explores themes of migration, travel and abandonment (in keeping with the subject matter of glacially deposited rocks), keeping at its centre a rich but oblique description of the Albertan landscape. The way I set the text also references the themes of travel over vast distances, in particular the use of repetitive inhalation and exhalation breath patterns (which offers contrasting timbres) as a way to apply pulse to the work. To me, these inhalation and exhalation patterns are reminiscent of laboured breathing after running a long distance, with a certain tenseness, anxiety and adrenaline inherent in the sound of this deliberate breathing. Other inhuman vocal sounds are layered over top including an open-mouthed breathing sound and a ‘sss’ whistle through the teeth. With these sounds I also wanted to add tension, but also reference the ‘open plains’ of Alberta, coated with glacial ice, upon which the erratic boulders are carried. I also wanted these ‘cold and icy sounds’ to carry the sung words as if the text were ‘erratics’ themselves, moving the imagery along from one passage to another.

— AMY BRANDON

Erratics

Text – David Martin

I awoke, beached in a field, tattooed in petroglyphs, and tended by children within earshot of calving glaciers.

The sun sets a headstone behind me on a frayed nap of fescue. Sparrows mock: I’ve been shanghaied by frozen tides. They trick up skeins from my sopping dressings, but the moon can wax my wounds.

Drawing back the blackouts, I rewatch my family fleeing, their tears melting a retreat from the moraine’s tide-line to shrivel in the crevasses. I huddle in a pallid plot, slabs shorn by wind swords. A capsized osprey breaks its back across my brow.

When they realize my stone arrows will end the war, ice waves will lift my bulk like a seed and carry me back to the carcass I was pried from.