Tropical Depression survivors

[sindhu]

hello

Tropical Depression
Released April 21, 2006

"Wave, Goodbye" is an atmospheric instrumental piece inspired by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in December 2004.
I started working on it shortly thereafter, finishing it in record time just after the new year (2005). It has a lot of
world music elements in it. I wasn't too fussy about what I used; if it suited my ear and evoked what I wanted to evoke,
I used it without worrying about its musical pedigree. I did, however, manage to work in some Bali gamelan, which is
musically relevant since Indonesia was one of the places hit. The music overall is quiet and sad. The brief gamelan
section which is about half-way through the piece seems to me to be an echo of happier times, a fleeting memory, in a
time of catastrophe and grief. The images on TV were compelling and I'm sure they contributed greatly to this impressionistic
soundscape I created. So many have lost so much.

For those of you who know only my electronica these next three songs will be a surprise to you, but for those of you who have
known me longer, these songs represent a return to what I've always done. Though I've been using Acid to
make backing tracks for older songs with vocals, I have to admit I hadn't been writing new songs---not for a number of years.
I started some, but didn't complete them. The hurricanes of '05 and their aftermath seized my dreams and torn through my soul.
I couldn't not write about this.

"Whirlybirds" was the first of the new songs I wrote dealing with this subject. Interestingly, it was written before my own
brush with Hurricane Rita. We evacuated ahead of Rita and stayed in a hotel with Katrina survivors.

The title was born of the stray thought that after Hurricane Katrina the state bird for New Orleans should be changed to the
"whirlybird". Those "birds"--the Coast Guard's helicopters--were the dominent image of New Orleans in the early days after the storm.
This song was inspired by all those images of people being pulled off rooftops, men, women, children, someone clutching a small dog...
the fear and weariness on their faces as they are loaded into those metal baskets that spun dizzingly beneath the helicoptors. Hundreds (?)
of chopper missions for the Coast Guard. All day, every day, without a break because there seemed to be no end of people who needed to
be rescued. All those aerial images of the city of New Orleans...all those houses and lives gone.

The recurring lines "From whence come my help" and "I look to the skies" were unconsciously drawn from the King James version of various
Psalms. There are a lot of biblical references to people looking up to the heavens for God to save them. In the old cosmology, God dwelt
in the sky or on mountaintops. Those whirlybirds must have looked like angels to those people trapped on the rooftops. Help, indeed,
came from the skies.

The people who flew those whirlybirds and plucked survivors off the rooftops hourly, all day, over and over, are heros. Everyone who
went into that city to do search and rescue work (yes, I mean you, Luce) who brought food, water, and medical supplies are heros. Hurricane
Katrina was not just a natural disaster; it was a tragedy on an epic scale. This song honors those who survived and those who saved them.