Music Mosaic

"Intro" - The XX

            I had a lot of trouble buckling down on a song, because I had a few that I’m in love with and that would have worked (in different sequences) with the millions of pictures that I took in downtown Salt Lake City. In the end I went with “Intro” by The XX because it best went with the feeling that I wanted to portray, which was sort of a chilled out view of the fast paced city. It’s an electronic song, but composed in a way that that’s extremely smooth, I wanted to echo that with my pictures so I chose to focus on lights in the city.

            The song has some fluid sections, which I interpreted as the big city view, lights in the street, and the freeway shot to symbolize movement. Just the way the beat goes, you can just feel the movement in it. Then there is a section of the song where it slows down and sort of pauses on some notes and this is where I have matched the photos of specific light fixtures, the tree with Christmas lights in it, the lit up sign, the lights outside the entrance to a building, and the lights on some stairs (that has really cool patterns on them because of the different light sources shining through the hand railings lining the steps). But if you will notice, the pictures of all of these things are fragmented, you don’t see the whole thing, I did this because when the beats do their pause thing its as if you were driving through the city and just glimpsing these things, it doesn’t wait long enough for you to really get the whole view.

            I really wanted to mirror in both how what could be harsh, can also have a beautiful soft side. Not to say that electronic music or the city is harsh, but they both have the ability to be, but in this instance the music is soft and flowing and just beautiful and that’s really what I wanted to portray with the shots of the city. I didn’t want to show speeding cars everywhere, or people hustling around, or anything that could evoke any feelings of unsettlement, because those would be completely opposite of what was happening with the music. Instead it was flashes of light, which often times is associated with goodness, and at the same time light can be harsh which is why I think it was necessary to have just pieces of it sometimes.