Ekphrastic Writing Exercise: The Seed by AURORA

A semi-structured freewrite for an Arts Writing course.

 Song: The Seed by AURORA, HAIK Concert Live 2021 

Twenty Ways To Listen To Music: Audio Space

Initial Listen: flowing, rushing water, the words pushing through thicket and bramble and wind. Surrounding a listener, circling, crashing down around. Suffocating and overwhelming gently, a warm breeze with the force to knock one over. Gentle but powerful humming, stern and crushing. Goosebumps, primal and forceful. The voice from a wood that beckons you and leads to truth. Lilting, powerful. Animalistic in the human sense, reminding us that we come from the earth. Even separate from lyrics, the piece calls to our human sensibilities. Building, accomplishing, floating.

Ekphrastic Write:

The rushing of a waterfall is overwhelming in your ears, the water flows rapidly around you, roughing at the skin between your fingers. The wind tears at your form, pulling your body as a leaf in the breeze. A lone voice calls out in the current, snaking between detritus and driftwood. It condemns the dead-coral ground, the sturdy footing of regularity built hastily, crushing lush ground beneath it in cold, hardened concrete. The Seed by AURORA reflects on the human greed of consumption, and the state of a world driven by it. This performance, an outdoor concert with an accompanying Norwegian men’s choir, calls to our most primal of sensibilities, with gentle, rumbling tones accompanying light and airy chords. The notes pull at one’s chest, suffocating and uplifting all at once. The Seed is a powerful call to action, a plea for the soft earth and reclamation of the nature that nurtures us all. It surrounds a listener, pushing at the chest and form, pulling on the most intrinsic factors of movement.

With the addition, in this specific performance, of the ambient sounds of the surrounding forest, AURORA creates a space that calls to every sentiment embraced and referenced in her music – an ever-present and deep reminder of the ground from which we came and will return to. When a listener zeroes in on the lyrics of the tune, it becomes more and more obvious why these natural analogies are so important: that natural beauty so sought-after is too soon lost in the bustle and focus of modern capitalist living. AURORA calls us back to our roots, both that of our humanity and of the earth that raised us.