Pok: Silver Ships on the Sea
Silver Ships on the Sea by Pok the Bard has been released to coincide with the Spring Equinox 2020. It has been added to Pok’s Anthology album.
Silver Ships on the Sea was composed by Pok in the summer of 1984. It is a wonderful whimsical wistful tale with a drop-D in the guitar. ‘Drower tuning’.
We all loved this extraordinary song from the very first hearing and are extremely happy to be able to finally release this version. We feel it is both authentic to the original, as well as capturing the full spectrum of sounds as imagined and conceived back in the 80s. We invite the listener to feel the closeness of the festival crowd, and sense the dry ice and lighting on stage as the performers writhe and invoke under the moon.
We had two attempts at recording the sea at Jacob’s Ladder beach in Sidmouth, but sadly both were thwarted. Firstly by strong winds which rendered the recordings horrible. The second visit was thwarted by somebody’s wretched dog, which barked and barked and barked for the entire time that we were there. It was unbelievable. It’s probably still barking now. Eventually we downloaded somebody else’s recording of the sea. It was a shame but it did the job. We had always imagined the flotilla of silvery elven boats waiting at the water’s edge at Jacob’s Ladder beach.
Originally the acoustic guitars were played on a borrowed Ovation-style instrument, but due to technical reasons we had to re-record them all. The re-recorded acoustic guitar was performed by Pok on his Tanglewood. There is some video footage of the recording which we hope to publish someday.
In amongst all of the layers of sound are two bass guitars and a cello, which contribute a lot to the atmosphere of the groaning of wooden planks meeting the tides and the rattles ond clanks of the rigging on an old ship. Maxx’s cello has a delightfully ‘wooden’ sound.
One of the elements in this recording that we especially like is the brutally fierce bass drum. It sounds as if a hortator is commanding the galley slaves, chained to their oars, to speed up, slow down or maintain a constant tempo. The numerous tempo changes and big open spaces made this song a fascinating technical challenge to engineer.
There remain a number of Pok’s great works in our machines, in varying stages of finalistion. We hope to finish more in the coming weeks. We shall inform Pok‘s fans of any such developments via our News service and on Twitter.
Silver Ships on the Sea is one of Pok‘s personal favourites from the growing Anthology collection. It is our deepest hope that you, the listener, will feel it and love it the way we do. Play loud through big speakers if you can!
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