Folded Sky

Folded Sky is a landscape tone poem in the true romanticist sense. The piece depicts 19 hours of changing light over the plains of central west New South Wales, Australia:

A pitch-black nightscape, where the plains are a void filled with insect noises and the rumbles of mining machinery in the next valley. A sunrise revealing the real geography of the plains, hay-yellow and pale green, bordered by layered clouds and mountains in the far distance. The sky folds into the land.

The plains get their colour from dry seeding grass, made magical by sunlight and movement. Everything glows like a hallucination, maybe out of a Gerald Murnane novel. 

The beauty is tainted slightly when you learn what is comes from: This place has been in drought for years. The temperature creeps to forty degrees in the afternoon. The view of clouds folded into mountains warps in the heat, and the ground is untouchable.

As the temperature relaxes you are left feeling a kind of unreality, unease. 

In the last clear light of the day a fog rolls off the mountains. Everything in your vision is replaced by a visceral, moist white.

I would like to thank Ariel Zuckermann, the players of the composition ensemble(s), Melody Eötvös and AYO for this beautiful opportunity.