8'17" by Jascha Narveson

These are two pieces composed for the dance piece 8'17" by Lucy Rupert / Blue Ceiling Dance – a series of dances based around the time it takes light to reach us from the Sun. Read more on the company's website:

https://www.blueceilingdance.com/

Lucy Rupert's concept was partially inspired by a poem by Hume Baugh, and the title "...so deeply that the whole Milky Way blazes in your lungs" is a line from that poem. The full text can be seen at:

https://www.facebook.com/hume.baugh/posts/10162957063420204

My own breathing is the basis for this track – I was recently diagnosed with mild asthma as an adult around the time of this project and thought that particular line of the poem was fitting.

Other sounds are deep drones I made based on "the sound of the distance of the sun" calculated in two different ways: the first, imagining the physical distance as the length of one cycle of a sound wave, the second imagining 8'17" as the duration of one cycle of a sound wave. Both drones were then transposed up many octaves into audible range.

An early morning walk with a mic and a stick and a mile-long construction fence is the final sound ingredient used in both tracks.

Premiered at the Theatre Centre in Toronto Jan 23-26, 2020.
Performance photograph: Melanie Gordon.
Dancer in photo: Michael Caldwell.

I was raised in a concert hall and put to sleep as a child with a vinyl copy of the Bell Labs mainframe singing "Bicycle Built for Two." I now make music for people, machines, and interesting combinations of people and machines.

jaschanarveson.com