Nada Brahma

I write music. I can't help myself. I've been doing it since I was seven or eight years old and I will probably only stop with my last breath. Unfortunately, I've never really figured out (Between parental discouragement, personal disappointments, evil choices and unsuportive peer groups, I have a lot of excuses and reasons. But at the end of the day I never prioritized it highly enough - it's nobody's fault but mine) how to make a living at it. During Imbolc in 2004, I spent a month in India as part of my day-job. That trip had a profound impact on my writing as well as my confidence in my compositional and performance ability. Since then, I have had some personal difficulties, but still a few fruits have grown from those new-found roots.

Some of these tracks are "sketches" which I thought were pleasant enough to listen to and important enough to think about as I refined the original composition.

I have an eclectic collection of gear gathered over the years and I still use all of it (even the analog!)

Heavy Traffic

This was the track that started the new round of composing and recording for me. It began as a jam that I loved playing in the living room of my apartment in Bangalore, Karnataka (India), while I was working there on a temporary assignment from my job in Dublin. After a lot of refinement it became what you can hear right now.

Thunderhead

What the title says it is. There's a story behind this song if you can hear it. I *do * have a tendency towards the impressionistic when I'm working without words. Unfortunately, this is a beta version of the song; it's been radically cleaned up in terms of composition. I just haven't quite had the time to polish the recording yet.

Nameless (Waiting for You)

This was composed simply to be pretty. It mostly succeeds, although it seems a little bit 'brittle' to me at times. Maybe that's because I recorded it using a heavy plectrum, but composed it using my fingernails. I was still just learning to play that way, and well - I hadn't really discovered the secret nail polish formulation that could keep them from getting destroyed after two hours of practice :) Anyway, this poor wee track never really got a proper name; hence the subtitle.

A Year and a Day

Another composition with a story - and it's the wheel of the year. It all just flowed one evening in October of 2005, but it's taken me forever to actually polish it to a high enough standard to release. This is actually one of my favorites, and it's all fingernail work!

Last Call

My mother died of cancer of the everything on 14 June 2006. That process provided some of the best memories of my life, and a sadness that still jumps out from behing the dresser in the middle of the night. I wrote this piece for her while she was in hospital, but she only got to hear it after her death. I was there when she breathed her last, and I know that she carried it with her.

This is an early version of it and has been tightened up quite a bit since this sketch.

I still speak her name:

Carole Lee Deangelis, 1942-2006