[I am incredibly honoured that eminent American composer, Paul Lansky himself has personally given me permission to use his audio and has even said that my video is 'lovely' (!)]

This video is based on Paul Lansky's astonishing electronic rendering of a passage from Jane Eyre where Jane is explaining to Mr Rochester a Gothic-type dream she has experienced that seems to foretell the destruction of Thornfield Hall - and their separation.
I made this very amateur video to try to isolate the words actually spoken from the incredible web of noise that Paul Lansky creates to explore this extraordinary passage.
It literally took hours and hours to try to identify the majority of words spoken that were not too distorted to discern (I like that some are 'lost').
This is the only 'fan video' of this track in the world - so please give it a listen and forgive the amateur nature of my video. I have loved the track so much and always to do something to promote it somehow.

(Description below by Jeremy Grimshaw)
"But sir, as it grew dark, the wind rose: it blew yesterday evening, not as it blows now -- wild and high -- but 'with a sullen, moaning sound,' far more eerie." Thus the eponymous protagonist in Charlotte Bronte's famous novel Jane Eyre begins her recounting to Mr. Rochester of the frightful dreams she had experienced during the previous night's ominous storm. This scene serves as both the compositional and the dramatic material for Paul Lansky's haunting electronic work from 1983, as it grew dark. As in many of Lansky's works, this piece seeks to present a spoken text full of inherent narrative content while altering the sonic characteristics of the speech in order to enhance the drama conveyed by the words.

"The piece," Lansky explains, "attempts to capture a classical dramatic experience in which the listener, not being the one to whom Jane is speaking, is put in the position of overhearing, or listening obliquely to the conversation, and this to the music." The work utilizes a recording of Jane's words read by Hannah MacKay (the composer's wife), whose voice is subjected to a variety of edits, layerings, and digital effects. The layers of speech are positioned carefully throughout the stereophonic space and filtered to various degrees of intelligibility, so that at several points the electronic effects at once blur the language completely while, paradoxically depicting the text's drama through the sheer sonic contours and surfaces they create.

The work is divided into four continuous sections, which are delineated by the type of digital manipulations to which the vocal elements are subjected, as well as by a series of distinctive background textures, and by the sequence of events in the text excerpts. As the piece opens, and throughout the first section of the spoken text, we hear a mysterious dribbling sound, at once similar to the patter of rain splashing in puddles and the blips that peppered early radio broadcasts; the effect sought by this, the composer tells us, is something akin to the mood of early twentieth-century American radio dramas. The second section intensifies the mood even further, as it falls subject to a relentlessly metronomic tick evocative of Jane's wandering footsteps, above which two different instantiations of the vocal element struggle for prominence. Here Lansky's careful manipulation of sonic space is particularly effective: in one moment the voice seems distant; in the next, it sneaks up on you suddenly from behind. In the third section the voice falls into a hypnotic kind of singsong rhythm (one that foreshadows the danceable speech patterns found later in Lansky's Idle Chatter), while the background is streaked with dissonant mechanical roars and moans -- presumably evocative of the "bats and owls" mentioned in the text; these transform into high, faintly descending glissandos in fourth section, eventually disappearing in a nervous jumble of speech. Lansky concludes the work in cyclical fashion: as the speech elements gradually disappear, the background elements reappear one by one.

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All clips uploaded solely for celebration and education....

All clips have currently been passed by youtube copyright software, but I appreciate that individual copyright holders may still wish to manually protect their copyright by issuing a retrospective takedown order. Before contacting youtube officially - which results in this channel getting a strike - please consider contacting me personally: [email protected] and I will immediately remove the material.