Library of Dust
David Maisel's incredible photography project inspires the new song below.
In my time exploring old buildings and archives and asking found objects what they wanted to sing, one of my deepest inspirations was an astonishing photography project called Library of Dust. The Oregon State Hospital discovered unclaimed cremains in copper canisters which had essentially expressed the unique lives within them through the process of nature and copper decay. David Maisel’s powerful images are breathtaking and liminal — there are so few first-person traces of the people who lived in asylums; this is an elemental experience of their lives. The project inspired my first musical imagining of the Library of Dust — its holdings, its nuances, its imprints, its foreverness. How would you give someone a tour of such a place? I returned this week to the first iteration of these songs, an object exhibit, looking for a narrative. A stack of six foreman’s time books marking employee’s hours sat next to a cluster of oak leaves I picked up at the same site, along with the writing below. Somehow, with the help of an open-tuned guitar Eric lent me, it all weaved itself together to become a song.
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