23 July 2021> Continuing our Sound Furies weekly riverse countdown, "Tiber" is the 23rd stream off Tributaries. It's 1 of the 1st tributaries we recorded, back in November 2020 before we had even released Herd of Birds. Think we started the stream w/ a treated kalimba that we jiggered to make sound twangy + in a pentatonic scale then in the end didn't use it, except maybe a note hear + there. It's 1 of the few tracks that uses conventional tuning + fairly conventional chords:

Sum of the guitars are heavily processed/treated (1 is recorded backwards actually) + the dulcimer-sounding thing is actually an autoharp played w/ drumsticks. There's a harmonica track + sum synths/loops, can't totally remember what we did + that's a sample from Shakespeare's Anthony + Cleopatra @ the beginning, saying "let Rome in Tiber melt". The Tiber has a special signifance to us, being that we lived + ran along it from 2010 to 2012 + then again in 2015 + 2018 to 2019.

Tiber

laminar flow
to lunar seas
marred by rows
comparative ease

in English a river's named for its edge
from the French Riviera down in a wedge
where our words come from

unless u count the Venus of Willendorf
faceless cuz we couldn't see our self
an effigy of all who came before
held in the palm of our hand

augured in the murmuring clouds of birds

the Romans named it for the fluxing plume
mountains of pottery + bones left to exhume
don't forget to wash behind your ears

all the fears + tears
down the drain
into the sewer
side by side
ride Rem + Rom
left for dead
only to rise
again + again

there's tribes that have never seen the outside world
for whom Tiber is just a word
the lessons learned amount to a hill of beings
unless we become 1 w/ the stream (x2)

+ hear's a video, reusing footage we took in 2010 when the Tiber came close to flooding it's banks (+ looking at that post now it's also when we got the squid w/ ink sack intact from which we got our Calamari Archive background image):

> Stream #24: «Styx»