Timber - The Powdered Earth

Timber
(featuring a bunch of our friends from near and far)
Timber is a piece that was inspired by the lockdowns and written during that time then released as part of our Round The Blue EP. To make this video we invited a bunch of friends across the UK (+ 1 friend in South Korea) to use their smartphones to record and send videos of themselves reading the lyrics and also to send new instrumental parts. We stitched together the audio and video to create this alternative version which is subtly different to the original.
Frozen by the shutter’s pass
A pinstriped leg mid-stride
You only see the tree rings
When you slice and look inside

Normal is an echo
Of a learned and foot-worn trail
With just one stamp of Mother’s boot
There’s a new world to inhale

Gathering the timber
As we wheel away from sun
To warm our expectation
That there’ll be another one

There’s comfort in community
But what are we, and who
When stony-broke and lowborn folk
Constitute its glue

Lovers kiss by megabyte
Whom oceans set apart
Christmas lunch and party punch
Surrealist works of art

Nothing must detain us
From all-consuming growth
From birds and bees came equities
What heart can balance both

Gathering the timber
As we wheel away from sun
To warm our expectation
That there’ll be another one
Notes by Eloise Hopkins who we commissioned to make an image for the piece.

For this track in The Powdered Earth's lockdown project I took my reference from a finger print (obvious similarities with tree rings). The gold of the fingerprint comes from the same gold gel press print that I've used in the other tracks. I rubbed through the sombre purple to reveal the gold of the fingerprint beneath.

To help me prepare for this piece I asked Shane to share his thinking behind the lyrics. He explained,

“This thing we’re living through has cut a slice through us and shown what we are inside. How we presume things will progress in the usual way, as if history is the only reference, and how that presumption has been exposed for the arrogance it is.”

The finger print in my image has been cut in half and shifted across so that it no longer matches up (the physical distance between us). But even though the fingerprint has shifted from what we are used to, it has forged new connections reaching across the divide, and it now looks somewhat like a crooked heart.

The tree rings and fingerprints remind me of labyrinths I've walked and how you can't always see the way ahead clearly or the destination but you carry on walking round the curves in hope. It reminds me too of something a nurse said to me following surgery for breast cancer. I was concerned because they had had to remove all of the lymph nodes from one side but she said, “your body will find a way, it’s as if the motorway was closed, you’d just find an A road.”

As an aside, a bit like word association, Timber made me think of Timbre (appropriate for the musicians!) and also, randomly, Timshel which means "you may" in Hebrew. Made famous through East of Eden (which I haven't read!). But reading extracts from the novel it becomes clear that the translation is important. Apparently, some biblical translations have used 'you shall' and 'you will', but using 'you may' makes all the difference. It gives us a choice. We have a choice here in this time.