If you have a little auditory burden, the water play on and around a ship is the best thing that can happen to you. The sloshing waves on the ship walls, the noises between shore and ship, the downpours on the deck, the storms and the whirlwinds.                                                                                                                  The shaking, but also the sailing itself, the cutting of water, the urgency of the stern and the echoes of passing ships when crossing bridges. But also the sounds that move over the water and come from far away on a warm summer evening in the river. The rhythm, the dynamics, the symmetry of the intense drip and the sudden silences. They are endless abstract patterns that are just given to you and for which, so to speak, you only have to fill in notes.                                                I must have been about three years old when I first walked away from home after playing with a neighbor boy. Dressed in a cowboy suit, I did not go home but walked to the busy Amsterdamsestraatweg, crossed it and sat down along the Amsterdam-Rhine canal to watch boats. That’s how the story wants. A worried neighbor who came home from work saw me cross the busy road, hurried to where I was now and brought me home again. This was the first attempt from my subconscious mind to be close to the water I think.                                              Forty years later, diagonally opposite where I was as a three-year-old, I would wake up in a ship with my eyes in that direction and remembered the above story.                                                                                                                            How I ended up on the ship is also a play of fate or the subconscious mind. Ten years earlier I had dreamed of a ship, and for a long time, I wondered what that meant. De Vecht had always been the river of my children’s imagination, where I liked to play, but a ship had never been here. After having lived for a while along the Gein and a short period along the Minstroom, I was again looking for a space to compose and make music. Coincidentally, a friend pointed me to a workspace on a ship. This ship was for sale, but I could also rent it for a year. Soon I was convinced of the marine life and the possibilities that it offered to make my dream come true. I bought the ship later on and converted it into a music studio. From that moment on I would spend my days in the Lek and the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal.                                                                                                                From the beginning, I had my own piano on board and enjoyed the water play and played with it. And the compositions are reflecting that natural reaction.

 

 

Written & performed by The Greenman, recorded, mixed and produced by The Greenman at Green in Blue studios Utrecht, Netherlands, masterd by Darius van Helfteren at Amsterdam Mastering, cover photo by Robin Pulles photography.

 

 

Video animatie John van der Wens, poëzie Mark Boog. 

 

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