Do you have a minute?
Over the course of the next year, I’ll be releasing an album of 60 one minute songs. One song at a time. Five songs per month, 15 per season. Appropriately enough, it’s called One Human Minute (OHM).
It begins on the first day of summer 2018, with the title song, and ends on the last day of Spring 2019 with song #60, Nothing Lasts Forever.
OHM is about time and it’s passing in the largest and smallest increments. But it’s also about what goes on during all that time: love, nature, seasons, culture, human failings.
The work evolves along these themes through the seasons, starting, of course, in the summer. Musically speaking OHM draws on everything I’ve done through my many musical seasons: jazz, pop, rock, spoken word, electronic, orchestral, and chamber music. These tunes may be short, but every single one is distinct. The lyrics are poetic, the melodies are memorable, the orchestrations are cinematic, and the production is surprising and varied.
The Book?
OHMwas inspired by a short story with the same title by the late, great Polish science fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem. The opening line of the story, which is in the form of a book review of a non-existent book, is “This book presents what all the people in the world are doing, at the same time, in the course of one minute.” The “reviewer” describes a book of intricately detailed tables of every human activity in the course of a minute. Like most works by Lem, though, hidden within that dry tabular data is a funny, poignant, look at the tragic human condition.
 Week #1, Song #Â
Listen to the first song here:
#1: One Human Minute: The title tune sets the tone for the entire 60 song opus, a sweeping mini-drama about being stuck in the moment.
Next week:
Song #2: When the Trees Grew Back, with its dark dance groove, uses images of running to evoke a sense of getting lost in the forest for trees.
