THE STORY OF BIRDS
CABIN MUSIC
Release Date: October 28, 2022
Pianist and filmmaker James Carson’s debut album The Story of Birds is a reflection of the inner and outer truth of the natural world, and the result of a nearly two-decade journey to develop a new form of music. Neither improvised nor composed, the album’s eleven tracks were recorded consecutively, with no edits or alterations, representing a pure distillation of the myriad spiritual traditions and natural forces that meet and merge through the piano in the off-grid cabin that Carson built in the remote Canadian wilderness.
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ABOUT JAMES CARSON
A childhood prodigy born with perfect pitch, Carson composed complete songs at age four and had his music performed by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra at age sixteen, leading him to be called “one of the most gifted rising stars,” by the Edmonton Journal. When he attended the New England Conservatory, however, his studies with Joe Maneri, Cecil Taylor, and the poet Robert Creeley led him to a dramatic life change: he walked away from music and spent two years backpacking and farming overland from Spain to Japan.
After his return to Northern Alberta, Canada, he then spent five years designing and building and practicing in a remote strawbale cabin to practice his music. The musical result was multilayered, detailed, meditative, and harmonious. "I wanted to play the whole piano at once,” says Carson, “in the same way that a single breeze can cause the entire forest to dance and tremble in unison.”
While continuing to return to and practice in the cabin regularly, for the last decade Carson’s attention has since turned to producing and directing Cabin Music, a feature documentary film shot around the world that synthesizes the myriad influences, cultures, and landscapes that his cabin and music draw upon.
Praised by Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer Milton Babbitt, who wrote of his “astonished joy” in response to Carson’s “exceptional pianism”, and by his teacher Robert Creeley, who called him a “genial genius”, Carson has been labeled a “meditative… piano texturalist” (TimeOut New York), who creates “trance-inducing… shimmering arpeggiated figures, played with such speed as to invoke Coltrane-esque ‘sheets of sound’” (Feast of Music), on a “quest to create sounds that reflect the magnificence of nature” (Times of India). Carson creates wholly new music with each performance by removing his own intentions and instead receiving and channeling all forces and energies that are present, both within and beyond the performance space, resulting in “delicate music surrounded by the aura of silence.” (Boston Phoenix). He lives in New York and returns regularly to his cabin.
TRACK LIST
Wake Up
Nest Building
Mystery Bird
Peaches
Tail Feathers
A Young Golden Bird Learning to Fly
The Story of Birds
An Encounter with Double Bird
At Night in the Hollow
Circles
Impermanence
All tracks composed by James Carson