Michael Nyman - "I'm Riding on a Tram" from "Cycle of Disquietude" (1998)

A selection from Michael Nyman's 1998 unrecorded song cycle with texts by the late poet, art critic, and academic Kevin Power.
Text:
I’m riding on a tram as usual
Observing all the details of the people around.
I look at the dress of the girl riding in front of me.
I break it down into the fabric from which it’s made
And the work that went into making it;
The delicate embroidery that trims the collar
Decomposes under my scrutiny
Into the silk thread it was embroidered with
And the work it took to embroider it.
Immediately, factories and jobs unfold before me --
The factory where the cloth was made;
The factory where the darker coloured silk was spun
To trim with twisted flourishes its place around its neck;
The factories’ divisions, the machines, the workers, the seamstresses.
My eyes penetrate into the offices
Where I see managers trying to stay calm
And I peek into account books where everything’s recorded.
But that’s not all…
I see beyond to the private lives of those who live their social lives
In these factories and offices…
All the world unrolls before my eyes
Merely as there is in front of me --
On the nape of a dark-skinned neck
Whose other side has I don’t know which face --
A regularly irregularly dark green fringe on a light green dress.
And beyond this I sense the loves, the secrecies, and the souls
Of all who laboured so that the woman in front on me in the tram
Around her mortal neck
The sinuous banality of a dark green trim
On a less dark green cloth.
I get dizzy. The seats in the tram
Made of a thin but tough woven straw
Take me to distant places and proliferate within me
In the form of industries, workers, their houses, lives, realities, everything.
I get off the tram exhausted and dazed.
I’ve just lived all of my life.

[@nicomedia]

i love this sooo much thank you for doing this :D :D :D any possibility to upload other songs from the cycle?? ps you are fantastic

[@gdudas]

so only the voice is done by computer?

[@PaoloFioreRules]

the whole song is played by computer

[@Francisco63]

Thanks a lot one more time, MinimalEffort, whoever you are ;-)

[@HarpsichordVinylGallery]

Fascinating.

[@eltonwild5648]

What voice bank did you used in vocaloid?

[@minimaleffort8780]

Avanna from Vocaloid 3!