Bright Dark Dawn is a new creative project of Anne Carol Mitchell. Learn more about the latest releases at https://brightdarkdawn.com/. A full-length album, I’ll Show You the Night, is scheduled to be released in the winter of 2023. The album takes place between the hours of dusk and dawn. With sparse arrangements and a dream-like quality, the music unfolds the evening, opening spaces for rest and wonder. The album features the story of a silver-bright salmon, a lullaby of night, a love-song from a distant star, and includes the work of Joy Harjo and David Bowie, as well as a song inspired by The Overstory by Richard Powers. The music nestles into spaces of repose and sanctuary, reconnecting with the natural world and …
SUNDAY DEDICATION: Sun Come Up
This is my Sunday dedication: “Sun Come Up,” an original song about reawakening the dawn that is surely being born during these unbearably painful times. The lyrics “Sun go down, sun come up again” are meant to ignite remembrance of the larger earth-circles we dwell in, so as not to get stuck in the cycles of grief. ?This song is dedicated to writers, thinkers, and artists who are staying with the pain, rage, and madness to bring healing, art, and regeneration. Buffy St. Marie originally inspired this song with her “Little Wheel Spin and Spin.” Joanna Macy and her work in framing the Great Unraveling and the Great Turning–staying with the grief to find belonging and purpose on the earth nurtured this song. Terry Tempest …
Learning to Sing Fire
One of my new songs comes from the poem Fire by Joy Harjo. She is an author, musician, teacher, and member of the Mvskoke Nation. I first encountered her poem in a collection of women writers on nature called Sisters of the Earth (1991). The images in the poem: woman, mountain, blue sky, and night wind speak of an animate world of interconnection. But what is the fire of the poem’s title? As I’ve been learning to sing this song, I have watched the prayerful resistance grow to the Dakota Access Pipeline. A friend from college who traveled to the Oceti Sakowin Camp in late November shared this message from a United Seven Fires Council of the Sioux Nation ceremony she attended: “…Each …
Songs songs songs
When a song comes the weather shifts subsumed by an all encompassing feeling. Sometimes the song emerges as a tiny thing, a few words accompanied by a guttural hum. If nourished, given plenty of attention, it may live up to its potential. In precious moments as luck will have it or longing will make it a song slowly slides out in one sitting: a thing to behold, tangible, real. She is someone to come home to, someone to get to know slowly, her gift, her story echoing loudly in your ears. I am songwriting again aiming at recording a new album of songs in winter 2016. The subject I’m dancing around is inspired by a book by Paul Bogard The End of Night. The …
3/21/15- Studies on a Driftwood Lyre
These are sonic studies from an on-going project with a beach in San Simeon California and an artist-friend who makes found-object instruments from gifts on the beach. These musical pieces contain both field recordings of different locations on the beach and a 6 string driftwood lyre made by the artist. (If you are up on your Greek mythology, a lyre is an ancient 7 stringed instrument, plucked, similar to a harp. It’s creation is attributed to the god Hermes. It’s a fret-less plucked instrument.) I took audio samples of each string, and transformed into a sampler instrument in Logic Pro in order to “pitch” the instrument and explore melodic possibilities. Here are some of the results. The first in the series was a whimsical …
9/21/14: Art in Nature
Songwriter Emily Shumway and I shared a set of music at this festival in the Oakland hills on 9/21/14. Joined by accompanying bass and a trio of three women we performed songs from poetry written by woman about Nature. Much of our material was drawn from the seminal anthology Sisters of the Earth edited by Lorraine Anderson. The Art in Nature Festival was a one-of-a-kind multi-sensory arts experience. Set in the oaks, redwoods, and meadows of Oakland’s Redwood Regional Park the event featured over a hundred artists, musicians, and performers sharing the creative arts with an audience of about 3000. What a unique acoustic experience singing music in the redwoods. The trees both amplified and absorbed the sounds. I found that quiet singing could be …
