We have a new video from Poems for Broken Screens. This piece is called ‘The Harmattan Haze’.
This piece was initiated by a fascination with the mass of dust that travels across the Atlantic ocean from the Sahara and descends on us in the southern US. The sky turns a tan color and we inhale African sand from across the world. It seems to alter mood and tone similar to the Santa Ana winds in Southern California, but more subtly. For years, I barely noticed it.
So for the piece, I combined the idea of one part of the world drifting to another, how it alters the feel of our experiences here, with a kind of love poem.
From the beginning I knew this was an atmospheric piece for Hilly. She has an ability to be quiet and mysterious in her delivery and nailed the tone on the first reading. I created a synthesized sound bed for it that looped but never exactly repeated, like wind patterns.
I remember listening to the Santa Ana’s one night and it was like hearing the landscape breathing, but at long intervals and geographic scale. A huge rush of air would come through the mountains from the desert at ten minute intervals all night long. Inhale, exhale. In a way that’s difficult to define, the Santa Ana’s seemed to change how everything felt, not only landscape and light, but mood and the perception of time. While the effect of the Harmattan Haze is subtle, its reach spans vast distances. So I was also thinking about how to define time that felt stretched out. This is the longest, slowest piece in Poems. Making slow, quiet work is a challenge we enjoy and it is counter to everything the internet and media have become. That it doesn’t work well in social media or on phones is a feature, not a bug.
Paul Slavens opens the piece with a voice of god narration, like a radio host, which he just so happens to be. And there’s a section at the end where Kit performs Morse code with her voice, spelling out “dust”. Hilly says “We have so much in common, us and the…” and then Kit performs “dust” in Morse. I remember asking Kit “can you do Morse code with your voice?” Of course she can. Don’t try this at home.
‘The Harmattan Haze’ considers how weather and landscape can affect our internal states, and how relationships themselves are like weather. So much of contemporary life and culture pretend to live unaffected by environment when, as it becomes ever more clear each year, we are fully subject to it, internally and externally.
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