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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Beautiful 6-panel case with original artwork by Kristine Barrett

    Includes unlimited streaming of The Spirits in my Blood Sing to me at Night via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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the epic of gilgamesh; field recording waldo point harbor, sausalito california

this piece is for my dear hawthorne, doggie companion of fourteen years, who laid at my feet while i made this music. he died a week before i was to quit my corporate job and devote my life full-time to art and music for the first time in my life. my parents gave him to me when i was twenty years old; he was my constant companion, and without a doubt the most consistent thing in my adult life. he knew every apartment, every city, every lover, every friend that passed in and out of my life. he loved me through all the idiocity of my twenties, the shattering grief of my thirties, and finally to the brink of a life of peace, creativity, and fulfillment. he will always be so very dear to me. ever a generous soul, with his passing he left me one last parting gift. in the depth of my grief i discovered the depth of my love. there was such beauty in his death. he chose to pass a night my parents happened to be in town; they were here when he came into my life and here when he left it. in my dreams i saw flashes of him confused frantic and vague. then around 4 am the images stopped on one: he stood in the sun on a grassy hill, looking towards a horizon I could not see. the frenetic confusion was replaced by joy. I awoke and he was gone. I buried him in a garden close to our boat beside a statue of st. francis. Wild flowers and fennel grow atop his grave.

the field recording is from a walk to our favorite spot we had taken the previous year.

lyrics

excerpts from the epic of gilgamesh (trans. herbert mason):

all that is left to one who grieves
is convalescence. no change of heart or spiritual
conversion, for the heart has changed
and the soul has been converted
to a thing that sees
how much it costs to lose a friend it loved.
it has grown past conversion to a world
few enter without tasting loss
in which one spends a long time waiting
for something to move one to proceed.
it is that inner atmosphere that has
an unfamiliar gravity or none at all
where words are flung out in the air but stay
motionless without an answer,
hovering about one's lips
or arguing back to haunt
the memory with what one failed to say,
until one learns acceptance of the silence
amidst the new debris
or turns again to grief
as the only source of privacy,
alone with someone loved.
it could go on for years and years,
and has, for centuries,
for being human holds a special grief
of privacy within the universe
that yearns and waits to be retouched
by someone who can take away
the memory of death.

credits

from The Spirits in my Blood Sing to me at Night, released June 4, 2013

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Kristine Barrett San Francisco, California

Kristine Barrett is an artist, composer, and vocalist specializing in experimental traditional music and ritual song from Eastern Europe, the Republic of Georgia, Scandinavia, the Baltics, Ireland, and the Americas.

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