Resulting Povray file was edited by changing the camera structure as follows:
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This song is called 金曜日でした, kinyobi deshita. It means “it was a Friday”, which is the literal translation of a phrase from the song I love the most of those written by the Italian band “Matia Bazar”. That song and its counterpoints literally make me crazy :–)
“It was a Friday,” Antonella Ruggero sings; “t' was a night of silence and full moon.” It's Matia Bazar's wonderful “Fantasia”!
I called like this for I wanted to celebrate the day I love most, the prelude to the end of the week. The day of gold, as the Japanese say – hence the title. The bass part came to mind on my way home, and I wrote the rest straight away – a kind of desktop improvisation, with no second thoughts. I orchestrated it in simplicity: double bass, then piano; a touch of kalimba and finally a pinch of woodblock. That's all.
And here's my translation of the lyrics of Fantasia:
A room, a house, a city
Empty streets and shadows in the darkness.
In Berlin, soldiers, tired and ageless,
Stand by walls with women near them
Premonition – in a little while everything’s going to end
In Paris, London and all other cities.
It all happened on a Friday – it was a night of silence and full moon
How much tension there was in the city
and how much in that room.
On the Seine a solitary barge goes on
Champagne in rivers, ammunition and people unaware.
In Paris, connivance under unlit lamps
Cigarettes and voices for an hour of happiness.
Premonition – in a little while everything’s going to end
In Paris, London and all other cities.
It all happened on a Friday – it was a night of silence and full moon
How much tension there was in the city
How much tension there was ...
Hei! Some tolling – of bells now silent
Radio London, a message, in the Thames, a wave.
Lord and Lady ‘nother whiskey are going to have
But those Englishmen in their pubs are no longer standing.
Premonition – in a little while everything’s going to end
In Paris, London and all other cities.
It all happened on a Friday – it was a night of silence and full moon
How much tension there was in the city...
...Lysardgig is a lysergic, obsessive, psychedelic, minimalist Ostinato. It is based on only two voices, one of which, the bass, is stubbornly repeated. A slow trend, like abandoning oneself, canceling oneself. Written in one go, last night. Yes, a nocturnal piece – a dark blue piece. Lysardgig Yggdrasil.
“The deep mountains of karma” is one of the verses of the Iroha, perhaps the most perfect pangram ever composed: a text that uses each character of an alphabet — in this case, the Japanese syllabary — exactly once. My thanks go to my kind friend Wim who taught me about it.
Also interesting to me is that the Iroha had been initially attributed to Kūkai, the founder of the Shingon Esoteric sect of Buddhism in Japan, whose life and thought I have recently got acquainted to thanks to Massimo Raveri's book Il Pensiero giapponese classico (ISBN 9788806165871).
Wikipedia kindly provides the English translation by Professor Ryuichi Abe:
Although its scent still lingers on
the form of a flower has scattered away
For whom will the glory
of this world remain unchanged?
Arriving today at the yonder side
of the deep mountains of evanescent existence
We shall never allow ourselves to drift away
intoxicated, in the world of shallow dreams.
I don't know how it is for you, o Reader, though the above lines evoke in me the verses of “Perhaps One Day” by Eugenio Montale... and that sentence, “the form of a flower”, is it not a magical reference to Umberto Eco's “The Name of the Rose”?
“The deep mountains of karma” is also a Grundgestalt available on
It begins with a piano solo, then enters uduhachi, followed by congas; bass and percussions follow; then baya suwuk, and finally African percussions.
The various instrument then exit one by one, as actors in a play, until only the first and the last one remain on stage and conclude the piece. I don't really know why, though rather than a Japanese piéce I'm thinking now of Luigi Pirandello...