ORIGINAL MUSIC
THE SONGS
The songs, the dance mixes, and the theme. All free to hear.
I SHOULD HAVE STAYED — the song from the painting Butner 1964, and the most-watched thing I have made.
FAST CAR — two songs out of one painting. I'm Queer. Leaving Home. And I escaped from abuse. Queers, come to San Francisco.
LIBERTINA LEADING — forty minutes of dance music written for the painting and its film. A revolutionary mix, made to be danced to and meant for a crowd.
THE LOSS OF ALL HOPE — the theme for The Libertina Project. Six minutes. This is the sound of losing everything.
NIGHT COPTERS — the second movement of the score, and the only track that became its own film. The painting is the cover of Book Two.
THE LYRIC FILM — the same song with the pictures taken away. Four minutes of her words on a dark screen, and nowhere to look but at them.
THE SCORE
The album · eleven tracks · 47:41
The score was written for the novel before the film existed. For the film, the eleven pieces were joined into one continuous mix — each track playing unmodified to its natural end while the next rises underneath it, so the music never once falls silent — and the film was then cut to that mix, frame by frame.
Everything is rooted on A, the human note. B-flat, a semitone above, is the antagonist. What sounds like industrial music is a synthesized factory with two shafts turning at 11.7 and 8.3 times a second — rates that do not divide into each other, so it never resolves. The state is not scored. The state is the score.
The voices are real. The horns are five real French horns, used exactly as played. The child crying behind the archivist was not composed. It was recorded.
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The music is free. The novel it was written for is not — amazon.com/dp/B0HFKZD43T. Leave your email and get the films, the score, and Book Three before anyone else.