There’s a tree walking around in the rain

Just as the patterns of falling rain create their own rhythms and melodies almost like a generative process, so this piece uses generative chord and melodic patterns as the basis of a piece that aims to reflect the mood of gazing out of the window at falling rain and losing yourself in thought and contemplation.

As a quirk, in the original field recording we can hear the recordist saying one word at the beginning of the piece - “rain”. This has been folded back into the reimagined composition to mark some of the structural  builds in the piece. 

The title of the piece comes from Tomas Transformer’s poem “The Tree and the Sky”:

There’s a tree walking around in the rain,
 it rushes past us in the pouring grey.
 It has an errand. It gathers life
 out of the rain like a blackbird in an orchard.

When the rain stops so does the tree.
 There it is, quiet on clear nights
 waiting as we do for the moment
 when the snowflakes blossom in space.

Rain in Newcastle reimagined by Cities and Memory.