"Escape from Spring" [4.1 MB .mp3]
A two minute post-chiptunes opera inspired by Poulenc.
Live MIDI performance by Travis Hallenbeck cut up, reassembled and rhythmically augmented by Tom Moody.
(A longer version was posted previously as "H.M.M.M. 2")
Libretto:
In a pastoral landscape in rural Virginia birds and crickets frolic among some old rusted trucks.
Enid, a hamadryad, listens from inside a majestic oak.
Some goths on mopeds enter the clearing to drink absinthe while sitting on the trucks.
Enid cries out from inside her tree, wishing to join them.
The absinthe opens the goths' frontal lobes so they can hear her and summon her from the tree.
Enid, personified as a teenage girl, jumps on the back of a moped and rides into the city with the goths.
Cruising through the night streets her song becomes an atonal wail of mingled pleasure and pain.
She yearns for her tree but prefers the speed, artificiality, and rootlessness of city life. The song ends with her riding the subway with her boyfriend, who drives a front end loader and still occasionally goes out to the Virginia woods for medieval role playing.