All music composed by Alex Eddington, between 2002 and 2020

(track credits and program notes are below)

Voice: Kristin Mueller-Heaslip

Guitar: Daniel Ramjattan

(Additional guitar samples by Rob MacDonald are used throughout the album)

Alto Saxophone: Jennifer Tran

Piano: Joseph Ferretti (Track 6), Elaine Lau (Track 8)

Electronics: Alex Eddington

Recorded by Paul Talbott at Union Sound Company, Toronto: January 2020

Editing/Mixing: Paul Talbott

Producer: Alex Eddington

Mastering: Sage Kim at Lacquer Channel, Toronto

Cover artwork: Michael Hersrud

Released by Redshift Records (TK483) February 19, 2021

Track credits and program notes

Lyrics

Jimmy Carter’s speech was included on the "Golden Record" launched on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, 1977:

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some -- perhaps many -- may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

Program notes

If you grew up reading Dennis Lee’s poetry, as I did, then you’ll probably understand the incredible admiration that I feel toward his work. Perhaps, like me, you experience a wave of childhood nostalgia whenever someone mentions “Willoughby Wallaby Woo” that sends you to your bookshelf, compelled to leaf through Alligator Pie for the umpteenth time. Mr. Lee’s poems are infectious, addictive and, furthermore, inherently musical, as though each one has associated dance steps that only a child (and that shadow-child deep within even the most “mature”) can remember.

And if the preceding paragraph rings true for you, then you probably also understand how difficult it was to choose six [originally eight] poems out of so many. I couldn’t take all my favorites, and I couldn’t use only the most famous ones. In fact, I don’t remember what my criteria were. I just took the eight that seemed right at the time, and I think the child in me was delighted by the fact that these eight didn’t really go together, and that my challenge was to pull them together into something cohesive. Think of this cycle as a loosely unified variety show put on by eight different children, or one child with a particularly active, even spastic, imagination and a hamper-full of grown-up clothes. After all, mood swings and near-hallucinatory imaginings – things that we as adults label as improper, or even insane, and try our hardest to suppress – are an everyday part of the life of a child.

Text copyright

"From Alligator Pie (Macmillan of Canada, 1974; Key Porter Books, 2001). Copyright ©1974 Dennis Lee. With permission of the author."

"From Garbage Delight (HarperCollins Canada, 20 12). Copyright ©1977 Dennis Lee. With permission of the author."

"From Jelly Belly by Dennis Lee (Macmillan of Canada, 1983). Copyright ©1983 Dennis Lee. With permission of the author."

Program Notes

The text is not mine – nor anyone’s; it was delivered as a spam email, with the subject heading "Scintillator". Spammers use software that strings together sentence fragments of online Public Domain texts, as a way of getting past email spam filters. This software is sort of like a computerized John Cage, strolling on an e-beach, picking up seashells without any interest in order or context. And sometimes, the result is striking.

My approach as a composer was first to make my own guesses as to what text-strings come from the same material (bhishma, bahlika, vena etc. made it clear that this is the case), and where the material changes. I treated some words as pivots between sources, whereas other changes are instantaneous. Then worked instinctively, treating each text fragment with full compositional seriousness, only consciously connecting my musical material when I had decided that two texts shared an origin. The shifts between material are frequently as though a radio station has been suddenly switched – although this is a radio that only plays solo vocal music (perhaps with imagined accompaniments).

My setting contains some humour, certainly, but ultimately Scintillator is a mystical piece. The text is the voice of The Internet: sublimely random, beautifully infinite. The singer is a medium for all music, and this is what she channels in these few minutes.

In 2020, for the album version, I added electronics in post-production to differentiate the voice into four abstract characters, each with its own colour, dimension and tone-bed of static. Scintillator is no longer just a peculiar concert piece, but now also works as a broadcast (or four?) from a lonely spacecraft to a distant audience who may not be listening…