meme : fairy tales

1. a fairy is born

2. the straw, the coal, and the bean

Based on the German fairy tale documented by the Brother’s Grimm

3. father frost

Based on the Russian fairy tale included in Andrew Lang’s Yellow Fairy Book

4. the enchanted canary

Based on the French fairy tale included in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book

5. the water demon

Based on one of the Czech fairy tales about Vodnik.

6. the rose

Based on the German fairy tale documented by the Brother’s Grimm.

7. the snake prince

Based on the Punjabi folk tale included in Andrew Lang’s Olive Fairy Book

8. the gold spinners

Based on the Estonian fairy tale included in Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book

9. the fairy grotto

Based on the Chinese fairy tale documented by Wolfram Eberhard in Folk Tales of China.

About:

I devoted much of the summer of 2008 on researching fairy tales, writing lyrics and music, and compiling this album.  The initial inspiration came from the thought that some part of every interaction and conversation is imagined.  Each one of my friends and acquaintances is represented in my mind in some way, and to an extent my imagination extends who they are whether or not I am aware of this.  It is most evident in passionate relationships where a lover could be aggrandized to evoke the sense of a god or  demon far beyond their actual capabilities or intentions.

What if you just increased the degree of imagination you instilled in your reality?  In the people and things and experiences around you? What does it mean to do this?

Reading Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Anias Nin’s Children of the Albatross I kept thinking about the many deep realities that were created, rich in metaphor and detail–> rich in imagination. Months earlier I had read Die Rose (track 6 is based on this) in the Brothers Grimm and was struck by how such a short fairy tale could be so powerful yet enigmatic.  There was something more to this fairy tale for sure, there was some way to make sense of it.  Fairy tales seemed like a good route to explore as they present characters as simply good an evil.  The complexities of beings in reality removed to create simpler symbolic characters.

Having access to an electronic studio I began creating sonic environments for these fairy tales, and wrote lyrics based on folk tales from around the world.  I focused on using simple sounds created through subtractive synthesis using a cs-15 and arp 2600, as well as the Subtractor in Reason.

The thought occurred, what if these stories were actually real in our minds?  As in they provided the metaphors and symbols to understand interactions and experiences in a deeper and more meaningful way.  I wrote the first track as an introduction to frame the listeners experience, in the form of an invocation to these characters which exist only in thought, but could be real.  Traveling around India and New Mexico, I found places around the world where folk stories are very real to the local communities, the magic and imagination in them is instilled in the environment.

By the end of the summer I was recommended Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell and many ideas began to come together.  He describes the invariant characteristics of folk tales and mythologies from all around the world, and considers how the stories could be so similar in form if the regions are disconnected geographically.  He was a student of Jung, and includes many elements of Jungian framework of the unconscious in analyzing folk tales, connecting them to human growth and development, as well as providing collective meaning for a society.  In some part I found what I was looking for: in all of the examples people were understanding reality and experiences by actively creating meaning with imagination through the use of symbols and narrative.