Before the World Sleeps
18 tracks
duration ~ 50 minutes
An album of music for piano performed by Miranda Wong
Release: November 15, 2024
Before the World Sleeps is a collection of pieces for piano, mostly written between 2023 and 2024, during a time when the world seemed to be steadily on course towards ecological, political, and technological disaster. During this time, the rift between human experience and political reality appeared to be norm, to the point where counteractive measures trying to “combat” or “fight” an inevitable outcome, no longer felt sufficient.
I made the decision to create this album in the fall of 2023, wanting to spend the following year writing and organizing music for piano from within this context—using some sort of post-hope perspective—where there was no assumption of control or even an expectation for having a long-term future. The goal was not to celebrate despair or calamity, or to come up with music filled with ideas about the end of the world. It was to reorient the compositional process to creating small pieces of music that I could finish quickly, and using an archiver's mindset, commit them to a recording rather than prepare them for public performance.
In an era filled with existential anxiety, locating meaning in creativity felt like a useful way of spending time that is concerned only with the experience of the here and the now. Composing music for Miranda and intended for recording, felt like engaging in an act of preservation rather than an act of self-expression. In the end, the 18 compositions included in this album were organized around four main "chapters" that I see as germane concepts to writing music during this time: narrative, memory, colour, and weather.
ALBUM TRACK LIST
Chapter 1 — A Council of Apparitions
I. Zaloasymphnesis
II. Castle Keep
III. Two Worlds
Chapter 2 — Memory, I often think of you as time ash...
I. A New Culture of Nostalgia
II. The Feeling of Forgetting
III. Lessons for Oblivion
IV. Phantom Étude
I. Fuchsia
II. Marigold
III. Aegean
IV. Wheelbarrow Red
V. Absinthe
I. The Cold Gathers
II. Ice Gods Don't Keep
III. The Introvert
IV. Prayer to a Vanishing Sun
V. Snow Dirge
VI. The Last Hymn
ALBUM CREDITS
Miranda Wong Pianist
Alfredo Santa Ana Composer
Mark Takeshi McGregor Producer
Don Harder Recording Engineer & Editor
Nick Storring Publicity
Scott Harker Piano Technician
Robert Darch HippoSonic Studio
Piano by Yamaha Corp. | C7 #B2690561 | Made in Hamamatsu, Japan in 1978
ASA Records - ASA05
November 15, 2024
This recording was made possible through the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts.