The Floating World is a suite that pays homage to the hidden souls and secret stories that drift through the streets of San Francisco, often unseen and unheard. Composer and bass clarinetist Aaron Novik has composed serenades for this imaginary, yet authentic space, invoking the spectral, carnival-like atmosphere of the city. The music was inspired by the words of three Mission District poets who inhabit the fringe of this unseen territory, Bart Alberti, Swan and Michael B. Loggins.
The album will come out in three parts:
12'' Vinyl Record with the longer songs
7'' Vinyl Record with the shorter songs
CD containing the songs from both vinyls
with artwork designed by Rebecca Peters. The front covers on the vinyl jackets will be printed by Rebecca on a letter press.
A ladybug lights on a sheet of paper;
Elsewhere a train pulls into a station. These
are so many wounds inflicted on the system.
At the summit of its insignificance
The sun shines down its deadly laughter.
Doomed to an irremediable and labyrinthine
Disorientation, my poems become catalysts
Of a desire for anguish and non-being,
To methodical distraction: Guilty as I approach
The summit, Guilty that only a method
Which substitutes objects in whose vigor
Of anxiety fingers do not grasp, do not find
The sting of the wasp, the sadness of honey...
It's dangerous and unsafe!
trip to market street
through a very scary busy traffic
in front of moving vehicles.
Just think how danger you are risking your Life
and yourself
Because you can only live once
and Harrell and Michael saw those people doing it
and he almost saw those people getting hit
by cars
and trucks
and buses
all at the same time if you ask me.
not being very careful
or Valuing their life
the way they should.
You have to computerize everything, human beings.
Put everyone on super-welfare the checks
come in the mail,
the mind, the mind is too precious,
it is virgin emulsion,
you want only nudity on your mind,
nither numbers & ladings & accounts,
computers that don't pilfer and steal--
nar furrows left to right in your foreheads
changing the radio characteristic--
word gone--
as brilliantly colored fish
we move thru the acid trip of existence,
as darkness the shape of a man,
bright sunflower petals emitting.