recorded at home on p/c by johann
cover design by johann with naomi
photography by naomi
dankie naomi, vir al die help

only available as a towerlig no-fi mp3 download

Silent Night
- A simple melody remains to me the most beautiful and pure musical expression. By changing emphasis on some sections of a melody, drawing out notes skipped over in a previous verse, or playing it in different registers it is possible to lend incredible variation to a single melodic line. The poignancy of plain chant is what motivates me when attempting to express the human voice on a single string or two of the guitar. Apart from the rather odd change of key – the first verse starts on a F, then the middle verse goes to G, then the third starts on the F again – this part remains true to the version in the Afrikaans Hymn book.

Silent Night (bottleneck blues version)
– When I first heard Ry Cooder playing the slide guitar on the “Paris, Texas” soundtrack, I was inspired for the first time to actually try to learn to play myself. One of the songs on the soundtrack, and I guess much of his inspiration, was taken from a song by Blind Willie. “Dark is the night” is one of the most haunting, sweetest and bluesiest blues recordings ever. I thought it appropriate to try to capture some of the loneliness and possible redemption that “Silent Night” offers in the style of the bottleneck slide guitar style. The blues has a way to be both sensitive and kick-ass at the same time. There is a spirituality to the blues that defies conceptualized religion, it speaks right from, and to, the soul itself. Maybe it’s the human voice represented by the slide of the glass over the strings, the same way the cello sings in a human voice, maybe it’s the voodoo of the deep American South blues, the juju of its ancestral African spirit, but the blues represents our human condition of contradicting joy and pain more than any other form of music does.

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Note: These recordings were made with a standard pc soundcard. The rather poor audio quality is tempered somewhat by the small size of the MP3 files. At least they will load very quickly, and you can still hear the tunes, loud and clear.

The cover art was made for a few CD’s written to serve as a musical Christmas card to the family and a few friends. Naomi took the photograph of the new moon against the skyline of trees outside our cottage. An unexplained bright light appeared on the developed print, something akin to a huge circle of light illuminating the slight cloud cover from behind. So it turned out to be even more appropriate than what I had in mind to illustrate "Silent night" - I like to think of it as it as a form of celestial energy shining from the skies.

13/12/2002