Aural Journeys,..
Aural Journeys is the moniker I use for my orchestral tone poem and ambient works. Because my musical catalog is so wide ranging, I'm basically forced into splitting myself into two separate entities. I want to keep my surname associated with my guitar work, so I created Aural Journeys with which to market my orchestral and ambient music. These pieces are from a forthcoming album entitled "Tone Poems From This And The 7 Other Worlds I Currently Inhabit". They are orchestral compositions with almost no "synth" sounds used. Each piece has a story associated with it that corresponds to the world from which it comes.
Dreams Of Flight - A world dominated by birds of all kinds, shapes, sizes, and colors. They fly gracefully across the sky, coasting on the winds, swooping down mountain sides and floating peacefully on valley updrafts. Sometimes they soar high in the sky, majestically alone, other times hypnotically, in massive flocks. It's a place reached only in my dreams. I made the companion video to the right for this piece using bits of video that I downloaded from youtube. I hope you enjoy it.
Last Flight Of The Phoenix - Based on the legendary bird of red and gold. The Phoenix awakes early on it's last day and contemplates the morning mist and rising sun. It then performs a ritual dance for the other Phoenixes and at the conclusion of the dance, bows it's head before launching itself into the sky for it's final flight. The Phoenix flies gracefully above the others dipping it's wings in salute before climbing higher and higher, in spirals, toward the sun, until it spreads it's wings wide open and the red and gold Phoenix bursts into a bright ball of flames. The ashes float slowly to the ground from which the Phoenix will be reborn.
The Drunken Rock Troll - Rock Trolls, as their name implies, are large, clumsy creatures made of a rock like material. They live their near eternal existence in short 2-3 minute states of inebriation. Their world is stuck in a cycle of hot sun with short, heavy rain showers every hour or so. The problem for the Rock Troll is that they need the water to wake them, but it also acts like a drug, or alcohol, to them, so they are stuck in a cycle also. The downpour comes, they all soak in the rain, wake up, and are able to move, but immediately begin to become intoxicated by the very water they depend on. So they stand up and stumble around for a few minutes until they become so drunk, they pass out. The rain stops, the sun comes out and dries them out, which in turn makes them hard as stone again, and that's where they stay until the next downpour comes.
The video to the left is entitled "A Festival Of People, Color, & Light" and is not really an orchestral tone poem so much as a world beat type piece of music. The whole composition revolves around a bass line that never changes. What does change is the various instruments and percussion used for each theme that plays over the bass line. The video consists of a series of festive scenes or sections of the videos. The music is choreographed seamlessly to the video transitions and one of the final scenes consists of two previous themes layered on top of each other. In musical terms this is called "polyphony". Enjoy!
