Ouzel: Planetudes First Single Release
Planetudes is an independent instrumental, experimental avant-pop music project based in Portland, Oregon, featuring the warmth of vintage analog synths, the innovative textures of experimental rock, and the intricacy of orchestral music, all supporting samples recorded from nature. Our goal is to awaken wonder and inspire possibility in the world, and enable intelligent, sublime conversation with each other and the natural world.
Our first single, Ouzel, is available now here on the site, on Bandcamp and YouTube, and will be arriving soon on streaming platforms everywhere.
Ouzel
The spark of wonder. It can pull you into a world. When it appears, it’s often a surprise. It appears, out of left field—sometimes just for an instant. It might be a fragment of a song you heard in passing, a weird word combination that you misheard, and something opens up. You are doing dishes and you look up— a spider web is shimmering, just outside the window. You catch your breath. In that brief moment you experienced something. A window to another world, right inside this one…
Inside that world— some glimpse of new ways, new possibilities; thoughts, sensations that were sleeping and are now awakened. You feel a burst of energy. In the past many, many sparks of this kind have passed you by, inviting, but you said, “Nope. Too busy.” Or, “Nope, I’m in too much of a hurry.” But this time you start to wonder, “What if…”
You step into the unknown… You follow the new feeling. You are walking on uncertain but brand new ground. Your knees are slightly shaking— heart beating faster—you feel giddy. What form will it take? What will it be? The spark is still there… are you going to follow?
The spark of wonder can appear anywhere. Mundane places. Beautiful places. Even in places of total desolation. You step out on the blackened surface of a forest-fire landscape, when you expected evergreen shelter. Where there should be deep snow, only damp char. But something is about to happen that changes your mind. You step out onto a small bridge over a stream, and clear water still flows. Maybe it will calm your mind…then your eye catches a movement……a small, gray bird flicks a movement, then hops onto a rock. It sings. The song pours forth with the water of the stream…a thrush! A water ouzel. The world stops spinning; the sound is so focused, time seems to stand still…you swear you can see the molecules in the air. The bird seems to say “Only beauty! Only wonder in what IS.”
Is this wonder a positive form of rebellion?
How will you translate this experience for others? In poetry? Art? You choose music. You will need: the warmth of strings, the soul of guitar and bass, the intelligence of drums, to (capture the bobbing rhythm of the ouzel, a.k.a. Water Dipper, as it dips and dances). And the Moog will be the air and water. The singer will be the bird.
Something in the birdsong sparks an awareness. Others have caught this feeling and have it in their own way. Evidence is everywhere: ocean cleanup, planting trees, bike paths, green technology, substituting plastic with, of all things, mushrooms! People are fantastically inventive. You are heartened. You are not alone.
You awake every morning with your heart racing. Translating the feeling in your own way feels scary and weird. Then you remember the bird. Poised at the falls, singing. The bird knows sadness. How could it not? The bird knows fear. Every day the lurch of hunger, the need to be on constant alert for hawk or falcon, every day the dipping into dangerous waters that no sane human would step into or even be able to kayak. It lives in a perilous landscape routinely visited by forest fire, brutal cold, ice, landslide, and even colossal volcanic blast and ash. And yet the ouzel makes a decision. It decides to sing.