water

There’s something captivating about the moments leading up to the first drop of rain. It’s like the world has inhaled deeply, holding her breath, waiting for something to give. Then finally, with her audience enthralled by the suspense, the exhale begins, the first drop of rain falls. And many more follow - especially in Fiordland. 

Water was written as part of a year long project in 2015; a journey through different landscapes around Aotearoa that inspired me to write music based on how each of those places made me feel, and to then pair it with video footage I had captured of each area. My dad, uncle, and two cousins joined me on a four day tramp into the Fiordland National Park in April 2015. Upon seeing the weather forecast I already had an idea about what was going to be inspiring my music. Rain. A whole lot of it. We started walking from the Routeburn road end and made our way up and over Sugarloaf Pass, down into the Rock Burn River which we followed up to Theatre Flats where we camped for the night. While the rain had mostly held off, it still felt ominous, and it struck me how wet everything was. Our boots squelched through muddy tracks, leaving dents that would slowly fill with water. There were soft ferns, crooked branches and beech leaves with suspended droplets mirroring the world around them. At every turn we could just make out the deep, glacial blue of the Rock Burn River, winding its way out to join Te Awa Whakatipu, the river that feeds Lake Wakatipu. As we pitched our tents for the night, the word ‘suspense’ kept rolling around my mind. The suspense in waiting for the rain to come, and the droplets of water in suspense amongst the trees, and in the mist that shrouded the surrounding peaks. 

Water is written in two parts. The first part is the inhale, the holding, the suspense. The opening chord is a broken Absus4 and I knew this would be how the song started after just one day in Fiordland. Ab (A Flat Major) is my favourite key to play in, and ‘sus’ is short for suspension. The ‘4’ means that the chord is suspended using the fourth note in the scale where usually a major chord uses the third note of the scale instead. This creates a slight dissonance and feels like it should resolve, but it never resolves during the whole first section because this is how it felt to be held in the suspense by the elements. The second chord is the same but with a major seven added to it to create more dissonance, more suspense. These two chords are like looking as closely as possible to the droplet on the tips of a leaf, seeing an entire world inside, then stepping back and realising there is a droplet on every other leaf too. As the melody sings out over the wash created by the heavy use of the sustain pedal, I imagine these suspended worlds becoming too heavy for their leaves, dropping and bursting on the ground. In the distant background you can hear a soft and low muffled synth, ever-present like the Rock Burn River visible in small gaps between the leaves. 

To start off the second day of our journey through Fiordland, we ventured off track following a spur up towards Minos Peak in search of the mysterious Lake Unknown. As we ascended we left the greenery far below and became part of the airy greyness of shiny wet scree and beaded mist. The higher we climbed, the more we became aware of the impending rain, like the grey world around us couldn’t hold its breath anymore. The first section is drawn to a close following a series of ascending phrases that imitate our climb up that spur. 

The second section begins as the suspense is finally broken with the first droplets of rain. The first notes fall in no particular rhythm in the same random way the first rain drops fall at the beginning of a storm. As the momentum increases, I'm brought back to that feeling of being absolutely saturated, surrounded by walls of rain, feelings of hopelessness even though it was just a bit of water. The rain was relentless by the end of the second day, and made our traverse beneath Minos Peak and around Lake Unknown all the more treacherous. Our goal was to make it to a basin known as Iceland, we knew it was a good place to set up camp and were hoping it would provide at least a small amount of reprieve from the wind. We descended into Iceland via a smooth and slippery rock face, finding small purchase in the tiny cracks that zig zagged their way down to our destination. Exhausted, sodden, yet mesmerised by the bleak beauty of our new home, we set up camp and huddled like penguins, trying to protect a stove whose heat was immediately whipped away by the icy wind. After gulping down a luke warm dinner, we dived into our tents and hunkered down, grateful to be out of the elements and and reminding ourselves what it was like to be warm. As I lay there listening to the drumming of the rain on our tent, I thought about how the day will one day become music. Monotonous, repetitive, trance-like. 

These words are how I'd describe the first few minutes of the second section. I wanted to convey the meditative feeling of walking for hours through endless rain, surrounded by greyness, eyes locked onto the ground a few metres ahead, noticing small moments of beauty, stuck in deep contemplation. The movement and gradual swelling of the lilting notes are also inspired by the rising flow of a the Rock Burn River. As the section progresses, bell-like notes jump out of the flowing sound, just like the boulders that forced the increasingly brown current around them. Up until this point, the piano has been the main focus. But now four different synths have entered the fold to add to the climax of the piece, the moment when the rain is most relentless, the rivers most brown and swollen, and when your entire world feels sodden. A low gliding synth bass drives the harmony, the soft muffled synths from earlier become more prevalent, a spacey synth that enhances the bell-like melody, and a subtle cascading synth that has a mind and rhythm of its own  is in the background adding that little bit of beauty that makes walking in the rain for hours worth it. 

When I was 18 and writing this piece, I must've had some teenage steam that needed burning off. I wrote a virtuosic ending that never felt right and I could never relate it to my experience in Fiordland, it was just so much fun to play. The main reason I'm including it in inside view is because I needed to feel like I had finished the song the right way. Water finishes just the way the second section started, and exactly the same way an episode of rain finishes. The droplets become fewer and further between, and is completely random. In the recording you'll hear the rhythm become uneven. At first this is unintentional because my hands were getting tired from the repetitive nature of the piece and started seizing up so couldn't hold the rhythm perfectly. I decided to keep this in because rain doesn't fall perfectly and I need to practice letting go of music with imperfections. 

So, I hope you hear my imperfections because its taken a long time to feel okay about letting them go and sharing them with others.