Pure land 2022

Written and produced by Noah Rosa
Digital sculptures by Jules Galbraith
Cover and design by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier

Ngô Tra My - Đàn Bầu
Nguyễn Hai An - Sáo Truc, Sáo Meo, Sáo Bầu, Tiêu
Ngô Thái Sơn - Đàn nhị
Vu Thi Thủy Linh - Voice and Phách
Pham Dinh Hoang - Đàn đáy
My Chin - Đàn tranh
Le Quỳnh Trang - Percussion
Noah Rosa - Field Recordings, Processing, Synthesizers, and Guitar

This project is funded in part by FACTOR, the Government of Canada and Canada’s private radio broadcasters
Ce projet est financé en partie par FACTOR, le gouvernement du Canada et les radiodiffuseurs privés du Canada.

A ground of rippling dark water dappled with dark grey and black, warm white, and green reflections extends boundlessly, hemmed in only by a background of lightly luminous white mist, into whose distance objects fade. On the water float lotus lily pads; they are deep, muted green, circular disks, cloven in the centre, with slight striations visible on their slimy surfaces. Most are semi-submerged, water pooling in the centre of the leaf. Scattered among the lilypads are quietly translucent drops, of water or glass. In the centre of the water floats a knobbled disk of intertwined rocky material : there is slate grey rock, pockmarked with mooncraters; there is a warm white fibrous stone with endless cavities, resembling coral or bone; there is another bleached white, similarly porous segment. This ground supports a gnarled outgrowth of driftwood. It too is bleached white-grey, striated with black. Its many branches are worn to smooth nubs, whether by age or weather. Around the driftwood hover pale, translucent drops of liquid, suspended in the air, static but seeming to expand outwards. Over the driftwood’s trunk grow rounded patches of moss in pale and dark greens. At the edge of the rocky ground, facing the bone-like tree, sits a small bird carved in stone, slightly worn and mottled over with moss. In the sky in the distance, three pale grey cranes with ragged wings are frozen in outwardly-bound flight at points equilateral from one another and from the centre. Distantly surrounding the entire scene, a continuous ring of massive but faded script in a forgotten language hangs in the sky; faded blacks and whites bleed into one another and into the mist.