“Xeno” (Drew Harris song) – Queen City Sounds and Art

DrewHarris1_crop — Drew Harris, photo courtesy the artist

Apparently the inspiration for Drew Harris’ song “Xeno” was pondering what it might feel like to be in space, as in outer space, for the first time. In the song his bell tones carrying the melody in soft but sometimes atonal sonic hues, the streaming, ethereal synth and incidental sounds indicates that Harris feels like the weightlessness would be the first striking feature and with it a wondrous tranquility. And that once you adjust to the unfamiliar sensation you would notice features of the environment alien to your experiences on earth. Night and day would be effectively meaningless outside of your internal clock so perhaps your sense of perceived time would be disorienting as expressed in the inventive ways Harris alters the tone and pace of the song and fades sounds in and out of the foreground of your hearing. Harris’ evocation of that first encounter with a world without an atmosphere and no real night and day would be alien to us in ways we have yet to fully take in right away because our species developed on the earth with our very reference points of existence stemming from that primordial collective origin as living creatures. And yet Harris makes that alienness hypnotic and beautiful the way astronauts have described looking back at the earth from orbit and from the moon. Listen to “Xeno” on Spotify and follow Harris at the links below.