“New Trails” explores the overlap between meditation and the hero’s journey, what happens when we take the time to leave the ordinary, travel to new places — external or interior landscapes — wrestle with the selves and others met along the way, and return to the starting place, transformed. The journey is everything that happens, your experiences and reactions when the unanticipated arises. The new yous that surface to meet those challenges that become companions. A quiet quest composed of six segments: Introduction, Intentional Focus, Meditation, Journey, Return, Coda.
Introduction: Shake out the scattered fragments of what remains. Let gravity do its thing, express itself in the need to get your body closer to the ground. Acknowledged or not, there is always process. Reach limbs in many directions: North, South, out, in. Look up and the sky hangs, suspended. An entrance.
Intentional Focus: Static lives between radio channels, stasis is death is earth is return is no way is back is is is part of the cycle, climb and descend, then move in the opposite direction. Is that a crescent, a hole, a whole? Make space and prepare to go in.
Meditation: Recline, seek the balance of your own horizon, open to what’s waiting to come through. Find how much stretch, how much give you hold. Be gentle with yourself, the world is hard enough. You are always arriving, tuck in, expand, inhabit contradictions. Travel as long play format. How much space can we create? We are still going through. Time and distance are just measures. To name, to gravitate, to contain. Transgress, establish boundaries, watch borders dissolve. The difference between.
Journey: Keep moving if you need to. The space of behind you falls away. How close how far doesn’t matter if it drives you. The speaker’s position, what emanates. Notes / stories / images / photos / inhabit your head / let them tumble and crunch underfoot as you continue. As you move through.
Return: Where are you now? Check your vehicle, does the body need adjustment, does body still exist. What requests your attention is not a question / is a direction / an echo / a chase / a sigh. Where we wear thin / holes begin to appear. Punctuation, a language, shared code. Perch there, listening, then / alight.
Coda: What thrums from the distance. What destination asks of us in the asking of direction. How you respond: implied spectrum in the idea of expansion. A circle, not quite closed. An open mouth through which to breathe as you re-inhabit each limb. The things that we carry, what we let go. The older selves that accompany you still, a haunt. A way less obstructed. The ancient idea of home: arrival.
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Details: Eric Holmes lives in Brooklyn and owns a barbershop in Manhattan. He is a founding member of Birds of Prey and 1/2 of Rhaeticus; “New Trails” is his first solo release. All music was composed for “New Trails” at his home during the spring 2020 shelter-in-place lockdown. This piece is a departure from his other work that embraces more unsettling tones. “New Trails’s” exploration of staying open along the journey is best experienced in stereo to enjoy the interwoven field recordings.
credits
released June 16, 2020
Written, produced and performed by Eric Holmes
Mastered by Keith Fullerton Whitman
Art Direction by Loveland Studio of Design (L.S.D.)
Liner notes by Jesica Davis
supported by 44 fans who also own “New Trails [Going In 003]”
A wonderful, long-form listening experience that melds the pure synthetic with the raw edges of organic sounds, bringing in surprising elements like the accordion and recorded sounds with the breath and pulse and EEG traces of an organism emerging from the signal. It can hover in the periphery as a color to the room you're in, or bear the scrutiny of deep listening without shying away from the complex texture of both sweet and sour. joebelknapwall