On The Seventh Day, I Rested

By the seventh day I had finished the work I had been doing, so on the seventh day I rested.

My intention with this track was to create a musical work which expressed the terror I probably felt as a newborn infant being nursed by an emotionally unavailable caregiver. I think I succeeded, but an interesting parallel to the compositional process was the high level of anxiety that I experienced during the process. Tension headaches, tightness in my chest, insomnia, waking up shaking in a state of panic, difficulty breathing; this past “week” has had it all.

I’m definitely drawn to themes of parental attachment ruptures and there’s still something about it that lights up my nervous system like a burning cross. I’ve been fascinated by attachment theory for some time and have just borrowed John Bowlby’s seminal work on the topic Attachment and Loss: Attachment Volume 1 from the library. I’m planning to take a deep dive into the topic, so it’ll be interesting to see where that takes me and what other creative works it inspires.

This track and these blog posts were all requirements of an Introduction to Digital Music Techniques assignment for university. One of the benefits of being in second year is that the assignment work gets more interesting and more amenable to fitting my own personal goals, including working towards releasing my first album which will probably contain this track. We were required to use layering in the assignment description, which turns out to be a really useful technique. Here’s a picture of how the tracks in this work were layered:

Creating the track actually took about three weeks of elapsed time. The “days” described in these blog posts are just a metaphor for “periods of time”, kind of like in another popular creation story.

Here’s the artwork for the track:

Here’s the final track on SoundCloud: