title: Lola
instrumentation: electronic
duration: 1:56
written in: 2014
In 2014, Marc Perlish photographed an antiquarian bookstore that had just closed. Now he’s published the resulting photos in an e-book entitled What Will I Find?, and each picture in the book is illustrated by a short piece of music.
My piece, Lola, accompanies this image of a pair of hands holding a photo of Marlene Dietrich:
It’s a quiet, nostalgic, dreamy echo of Weimar-era cabaret music, created using a mixture of soft synths, keyboards (Rhodes, Wurlitzer and acoustic piano), and sounds associated with 20th-century communication media — shuffling pages, a dial-up modem, a reel-to-reel projector. Those of you with absolute pitch will notice the tuning sliding slowly downward throughout.
If you have an Apple device, you can get What Will I Find? on the iTunes store.