Album Overview: 

 

• Album #9 contains nine songs composed by me, Andrzej Pietrewicz

  • The songs feature original field recordings, percussion, voices and other human sounds.

  • The songs also include a small section of piano, harp, guitars, flutes, vibraphone, strings and synth

  • The album is my sixth public release. It is about 53 minutes long.

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• The songs are inspired by what is sometimes referred to as the “dark night” (of the senses / of the soul).

  • ​The dark night is a spiritual concept that can involve the loss of the felt sense of the presence of God. It is a process of spiritual and worldly unlearning, unknowing, and weaning from previous, often false, consolations and identities. It can include feelings of abandonment, desolation, emptiness, darkness, confusion, disorientation, loss of control, loss of purpose or direction, fragmentation, grief, desperation, inconsolability, hopelessness, overwhelm, surrender.

    • The dark night is well described by Christian mystics St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Julian(ne) of Norwich, Thomas Merton, and others. The concept is also featured in other spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam/Sufism, Judaism and more. 

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• The songs also explore the transformation, renewal, and rebirth that can be the outcome of the dark night

  • The dark night can result in the stripping away of false identities, to a more profound communion with one’s own true nature, to deeper growth and compassion, greater or renewed clarity, purpose, hope and responsibility, to forgiveness, and more authentic and healthy attitudes and relationships. 

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• In exploring transformation, renewal, and rebirth, the songs meditate on some of the awkwardness, tenuousness, fragility, discomfort, labour, pain, physical mental emotional spiritual toll, fear, and sometimes even terror that can be involved in the process. 

  • ​​I can't help but think about the butterfly in this context, how the caterpillar literally dissolves into a primordial goo in its cocoon during the molting process before being reformed as a butterfly - it does not simply sprout wings, but its former identify is completely dissolved before being reconstituted and transformed 

  • In Christian scripture, the stories of Job and of Jonah and the whale are famous examples of (uninvited) transformations involving passages through dark, trying circumstances.

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• Musically, the songs extend, bring together more fully, and  focus elements that were introduced in my previous albums, for example, the use of spoken word, repetition, breathing, bells, and field recordings. 

  • The songs from previous albums that most closely come to mind are “Psalm”, “All things new”, and “Sleeper, awake” from the album ‘#7’ and “Living waters”, “Presence in our mouths” “Presence in the spirit”, and “A new heaven and a new earth” from the album ‘#8’.

 

• On a personal note, felt compelled to make this music to voice what I have been going through in my own life, and to attempt to explore and gain some perspective on it and grow from it.

  • I hope that, even amidst the darkness and struggle of some of the album, listeners will perceive, as I do, the light of possibility and hope in the music.