‘Leaving' is a dynamic musical artwork that represents a new frontier in what art and music is, and should do; an experiment in storytelling, in sonic possibilities, in the value of art, and in the relationship between audience, collector, artist and authorship. The stem owners control everything: who sings the vocal part and with what melodies; what drums underpin the performance; the melodies, and even the lyrics. All the variations made possible work together seamlessly such that the artwork includes 6400 unique compositions - not trivially different, but each one its very own song, with the potential to be anything from a piano ballad to a 1980s synth track, to a sample-heavy piece of modern electronica. Each stem-owner has the power to alter the whole master, without knowing what the other stem owners will do - collectors might collaboratively arrive at a genre by responding to each others’ choices, create a genre-spanning hybrid, or actively seek out the most disharmonious composition possible.
The song explores the different states of a unique relationship between three people; a love triangle told from the perspective of all those involved. The three characters interweave and blur into each other, with the different primary emotional states as represented by the instrumental, and the different sides of the story as told by the lyrics, intermingling with unpredictable results - eventually, past present, and future; the betrayed, the betrayer and the object of the betrayal; loss, guilt and hope; all meld into one. In this way, the master track will dynamically reflect the intricate complexity of love and loss. Each individual part has been separately written, performed and recorded in a decentralised fashion by HMLTD and our collaborators, Tallulah Eden and Seth Evans. Each unique composition is a snapshot of a different angle of the love triangle in both time and perspective. The accompanying cover art, beautifully rendered by our collaborator Mike Raymond, is the visual representation of ‘Leaving'. Each possible composition; each distinct moment in the relationship, has a corresponding and distinct visual representation: three lovers, 6400 different dances, spinning and looping around in eternity.
