The Story of Birds Cabin Music

• James Carson: Wake Up:
• 1Carson: Wake Up05:07
• Nest Building:
• 2Carson: Nest Building02:52
• Mystery Bird:
• 3Carson: Mystery Bird05:21
• Peaches:
• 4Carson: Peaches02:54
• Tail Feathers:
• 5Carson: Tail Feathers03:10
• A Young Golden Bird Learning to Fly:
• 6Carson: A Young Golden Bird Learning to Fly03:00
• The Story of Birds:
• 7Carson: The Story of Birds04:50
• An Encounter with Double Bird:
• 8Carson: An Encounter with Double Bird07:22
• At Night in the Hollow:
• 9Carson: At Night in the Hollow06:47
• Circles:
• 10Carson: Circles06:40
• Impermanence:
• 11Carson: Impermanence04:42
• Total Runtime52:45

Info for The Story of Birds

Pianist and filmmaker James Carson’s debut album The Story of Birds is a reflection of the inner and outer truth of the natural world, and the result of a nearly two-decade journey to develop a new form of music. Neither improvised nor composed, the album’s eleven tracks were recorded consecutively, with no edits or alterations, representing a pure distillation of the myriad spiritual traditions and natural forces that meet and merge through the piano in the off-grid cabin that Carson built in the remote Canadian wilderness.

James Carson, piano

James Carson
has developed a new form of music and over the last twelve years has produced and directed Cabin Music, a feature film, to share it with the world.

A childhood prodigy born with perfect pitch, Carson composed complete songs at age four and had his music performed by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra at age sixteen, leading him to be called “one of the most gifted rising stars” by the Edmonton Journal. When he attended the New England Conservatory, however, his studies with Joe Maneri, Cecil Taylor, and the poet Robert Creeley led him to a dramatic life change: he walked away from music and spent two years backpacking and farming overland from Spain to Japan. After his return to Northern Alberta, Canada, he then spent five years designing, building, and practicing in a remote strawbale cabin. The musical result was multilayered, detailed, meditative, and harmonious. "I wanted to play the whole piano at once,” says Carson, “in the same way that a single breeze can cause the entire forest to dance and tremble in unison.”

Praised by Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer Milton Babbitt, who wrote of his “astonished joy” in response to Carson’s “exceptional pianism”, and by his teacher Robert Creeley, who called him a “genial genius”, Carson has been labeled a “meditative… piano texturalist” (Time Out New York), who creates “trance-inducing… shimmering arpeggiated figures, played with such speed as to invoke Coltrane-esque ‘sheets of sound’” (Feast of Music), on a “quest to create sounds that reflect the magnificence of nature” (Times of India). Carson creates wholly new music with each performance by removing his own intentions and instead receiving and channeling all forces and influences at the piano, both within and beyond the performance space, resulting in “delicate music surrounded by the aura of silence.” (Boston Phoenix). He lives in New York and returns regularly to his cabin.

This album contains no booklet.