Gelsey Bell – mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]
released as a double CD and digitally September 13th, 2024
Gold Bolus Recordings is proud to release the studio double album of Gelsey Bell’s mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning], an experimental opera set in a world where humans no longer exist.
mɔɹnɪŋ was originally inspired by Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us (2007), which begins with the thought experiment: what would happen to the Earth if humans disappeared starting now? Composer and librettist Gelsey Bell felt a range of emotions reading the book – from anger and guilt at the destructive legacy of humans, to a profound hope and humbled awe at the colossal power, resilience, and adaptability of the planet and its living beings. From this wellspring arose mɔɹnɪŋ (which is how one spells both “mourning” and “morning” for an American accent in the International Phonetic Alphabet). As Bell explains,
“I believe bringing scientific theory into the aesthetic realm allows us to more easily react to it as we do cultural mythology: on a spiritual and emotional level alongside the analytical and pedagogical. One essential goal of mɔɹnɪŋ is to give audiences a space to meditate on their relationship to the natural world outside of human timescales in order to shed light on our current climate crisis. To truly understand the severity of humanity’s actions requires thinking on alternate time scales, and musical storytelling (especially opera) has great power to help us feel time outside of our everyday experience.”
Throughout mɔɹniŋ, an ensemble of five vocalist/multi-instrumentalists guides the listener through the changes on Earth as forests grow back, new species evolve, and the human-made world erodes away. This work is a fantastical and playful exploration into the dire political and ethical contradictions that structure current human relations with nature. The first third of the album outlines the earliest changes on Earth following the disappearance of humans, such as buildings falling apart (“Human Home”), plants re-greening cities and domesticated animals being preyed on by wild animals (“A Sea of Kudzu”), and fires sweeping the landscape (“Fires”).
Time moves exponentially throughout the story as we go from a day to a week, week to year, year to century, and then to millenia and millions of years beyond. In “Forests” and “Bristlecone Pines,” our experience shifts from human timescales to those of ancient trees which live for thousands of years. Forests expand, plastics and nuclear waste breakdown, and the Voyager spacecraft leaves the Oort Cloud (“Surviving”). One million years into the future, “Explosion” celebrates an eruption of new life forms, including a species evolved from Australian octopuses called blooklungs (“Blooklungs”). Accelerating into the future, Earth becomes a popular tourist destination for solar eclipses. And as blooklung society progresses, trees still thrive and ceramics fired by human hands remain preserved in the planet’s dirt (“Nothing Lasts Forever”). The story eventually travels 1.6 billion years into the future, when life no longer exists on Earth (“With Time”).
Gelsey Bell – Voice, Daxophone, Accordion, Dulcetina Harmonium, Modular Synthesizer, Objects
Justin Hicks – Voice, Synthesizer (2-5), Sundrum, Autoharp, Modular Synthesizer, Objects
Aviva Jaye – Voice, Celtic Harp, Objects
Ashley Pérez Flanagan – Voice, Modular Synthesizer, Objects
Paul Pinto – Voice, Metallophone, Synthesizer (9, 14), Modular Synthesizer, Objects
All composition by Gelsey Bell, arranged with the ensemble
Produced by Gelsey Bell with Brent Arnold
Recorded at Douglass Recording Studio in Brooklyn, NY
Engineered by Peter Karl
Mixed by John Thayer
Mastered by MACRO/Amar Lal
Album Art by Roger Peet