death pod was one of my first projects. I am deeply grateful to Nol Simonse for inviting me into beginning to make music for dance. The first song in this piece I had written about a year before, inspired by the performance ‘DIG: a hole to put your grief in’. The shovel rhythm and ‘bury away, I feel’ refrain became the score for their opening scene, where Jim enters, weary from a long day, or perhaps a long life. I created a new coda for the song, interleaving Jim Cave’s warm and reaching voice with layers of singing I hoped could evoke spirits, carrying us into the purgatory space of their world.

The rest of the music in the score was created in response to Nol and Jim’s text and ideas. They collaged, experimented, and came back to me with requests for new scenes – a distillation of hours of Jim’s dream voice notes (“breathing dream”), a “big crash”, a score for a slow crawl, water drips for bathing (“fabric dance / death drips”). These were all so rewarding to find.

 “one lose, carry on / i invited death in” rests in how I imagine the bittersweet resignation of death after a satisfied life, death as a dawning, a gentle visit from a hummingbird, rounds that could carry one on onward through endless transformations.