01/31/2018

Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton – Music and Poetry of the Kesh

Music and Poetry of the Kesh is the documentation of an invented Pacific Coast peoples from a far distant time, and the soundtrack of famed science fiction author, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home.

This past Monday, January 22, Ursula passed from this realm to another leaving a life spent building and exploring other worlds while challenging social concepts of the real word she inhabited.

Freedom To Spend had been working under Ursula’s enthusiastic endorsement and with Todd Barton, her musical collaborator on Kesh, to give the music that accompanied her 1985 epoch a new life. With the Le Guin family’s encouragement to move forward with our planned release, we are humbled to play this small role in sharing Ursula’s work.

As Pete Swanson, one third of Freedom To Spend, stated, Ursula’s “legacy is her work which transformed the world, and this is another piece of the universe that her imagination birthed becoming real.” Listen to “A Teaching Poem / Heron Dance” below.

Ursula’s daughters Elisabeth and Caroline Le Guin, Barton, and Moe Bowstern will join Visible Cloaks with song, readings, and recollections to celebrate Ursula and this new edition of Kesh in Portland, Oregon on Friday, April 6, 2018 at the Leaven Community Center, with a special screening by Vanessa Renwick.