Goodnight Turtle Balloon (2023) marimba solo + live processing · 6 minutes · advanced
Goodnight Turtle Balloon was written for Sam Wheeler.
If you want to be notified when the score releases, send me an email at sebastian.zhang.music@gmail.com with the subject "Goodnight Turtle Balloon score".
Look up. The sky is a glistering inky ocean. In the stillness of night, a turtle bobs its head out from the sky above; ripples follow in concentric circles, the sky dancing in waves. Its head slinks back into the darkness, like a lost balloon fading into the night. The sky returns to an odd sense of wrongly normal, with a clear message:
You didn't see anything.
Goodnight Turtle Balloon was written about my encounters with a serene turtle pond late at night, and this type of beautiful, comic absurdity that comes with envisioning a pond full of sleepy turtles as the night sky.
Musically, this song draws upon live-looping music performances and the broader genre of psychedelic pop and shoegaze. Specifically, I looked to a lot of shoegaze effects chains for the desired electronic effects on the marimba.
I think of these electronic effects more as "guitar pedals" rather than "classical music electronic processing".