In March of 1992, I had endured my first winter in Budapest, Hungary, and it was bleak. We were still to get a sunny day at that time, and I think one appeared in April.
It was in this strangely dark and cold environment, I watch people, including myself, scuttle from place to place and find ways to entertain themselves around the oil heaters that ran non-stop in most buildings and houses.
Little did I know that I would be foretelling just how dystopian our future lives would be as we continued shrinking our lives, not just down to the urban structures in which we lived and worked, but down further still into little mobile screens and little toxic echo chambers of unfiltered human frustration and fetish (social media).
I should just call this the Netflix and Amazon and Meta song!
Wintercity is actually a poem. One to be read with growing angst and contempt and despair. But in tranforming it to song, I stripped it back further and applied quite a bit of surgery to amplify the incessant rythms and staccato vocals to capture the poet’s voice in a very fluid, swirling, raging, ebbing song.
My usual song structure got thrown out the window into the Wintercity to honour the song’s poetic roots. Likewise there are no rhymes, this song is pieced together by meter like that woodwork that is made up of dry joints that push together – back from the days when we had time to craft things slowly.
You’ve been warned 🙂
Wintercity scratchings
Wintercity Lyrics
So small
So small
Our lives
Against our towering creation
It stands
It stands
While we
Remain its ever humble servants
Our grey bodies live in the shadows of its neon-draped walls
Our grey bodies live in the shadows of its neon-draped walls
Our grey bodies live in the shadows of its neon-draped walls
Our grey bodies live in the shadows of its neon-draped walls
We are
We are
The most
Willing and compliant prisoners
We built
We built
Our own
Prison, built it from the inside out
Leaving no spaces for doors, leaving no hope for our freedom
Leaving no spaces for doors, leaving no hope for our freedom
Leaving no spaces for doors, leaving no hope for our freedom
Leaving no spaces for doors, leaving no hope for our freedom
Instead
Instead
We perfect
Our own schedules and exercise yards
And find
And find
Better ways
To perfect the skill of killing time
Killing time is the crime with no sentence apart from itself
Killing time is the crime with no sentence apart from itself
Killing time is the crime with no sentence apart from itself
Killing time is the crime with no sentence apart from itself
And our
And our
And our court
Pronounces our fate with this maxim
And our
And our
And our court
Pronounces our fate with this maxim
We are dead, we are dead, we are dead, until proven alive
We are dead, we are dead, we are dead, until proven alive
We are dead, we are dead, we are dead, until proven alive
We are dead, we are dead, we are dead, until proven alive
So small
So small
Our lives
Against our towering creation