SONG:Now the Snow [1]. (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: “It’s snowing on Mars” [2], iTwire, 30 Sep 2008, as cited in the post It falls everywhere [3].
ABSTRACT: The Phoenix lander is lonely. (It’s also dying as I write this [4], but then again, so are we all.) It’s very far from home in a very empty place with not a lot to look at except that which one can see under a microscope. And yet it looks around. And then there’s snow. I’m well aware that Mars isn’t really as red as all that, but “red, red sand” has a nice resonance with The Waste Land [5], and makes the image somehow complete. White snow. Red sand. Endless plains. It occurs to me, too, that snowfall on Mars must look different than it does on Earth – Mars exerts slightly less gravitational force, and the atmosphere is much more diffuse [6], so I imagine snow falls slowly, in smaller circles than what we’re used to.
I recorded this song with a guitar and a ukulele. There’s some pitch-shifting upward, into the fragile, icy registers. I added some sine waves from a tone generator and made a loop from a sonar sound effect – both had a kind of NASA transmission feel to me. And I whispered. I tried to make this sound like Things In Herds [7], but it came out more like Philip Glass. I’m not complaining. It does what I wanted it to do.
METHOD:
Guitar: Capo on the fifth fret. Or use a ukulele.
