3rd
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Ondine: Charles Spearin (2009)
The Happiness Project is perhaps one of the most innovative releases this year, if not in recent years. Charles Spearin (a Broken Social Scene collective member) recorded his family and neighbors speaking, and then notated the voices into music. A child’s circuitous speech pattern is reimagined as jazz. A woman describing the first time she is able to hear with cochlear implants becomes a series of beautiful piano figures. Mrs. Morris, a neighbor who reassuringly tells us that happiness is love, takes on the properties of a tenor saxophone. The track “Anna” breaks for a bird solo. This is an absolutely brilliant and astonishingly beautiful album. Spearin reminds us that the natural rise and fall of our voices, in combination with the rhythm of our speech, is a type of accidental composition that occurs each time we try to express our thoughts, feelings, and desires. It is perhaps the very first and most overlooked form of music.
