Pianist and filmmaker James Carson to release debut album The Story of Birds, October 28 on Bright Shiny Things
Pianist and filmmaker James Carson’s debut album The Story of Birds will be released October 28 on Bright Shiny Things. The eleven tracks—recorded consecutively, with no edits or alterations—grew out of Carson's recurring months of isolation and practice in a remote strawbale cabin that he built in the Canadian wilderness.
The release is part of a larger project that Carson calls Cabin Music, a nearly two-decade effort to transform the way in which music is created by placing it in a space between composition and improvisation, and uniting musician and audience as one. Caron's performances remove his own intentions, instead receiving and channeling all forces and energies that are present within and beyond the performance space, resulting in profound experiences that have been hailed as “meditative” (Time Out New York), “trance-inducing” (Feast of Music), and “delicate music surrounded by the aura of silence” (Boston Phoenix). In this same way, The Story of Birds is a pure channeling of the myriad spiritual traditions and natural forces that meet, merge, and are distilled through the piano in his cabin.
An album release event on Oct 27 will be held in the intimate Crypt chapel under the Church of the Intercession in Harlem, presented by Death of Classical.
Says Carson, “The cabin is a place of solitude and practice, but it is also a place of initiation and facing the unknown. Confronting the unknown, ancient civilizations trusted the birds as guides and considered the language of birds to be the language of the initiated. Today, many birds nest near the cabin: robins, sparrows, crows, hawks. But unseen birds live there as well. Some are friends, some are teachers, some are older than time itself, and some have never been born. This album is the story of those birds, The Story of Birds.”