![]() ![]() ![]() Le Guin and Barton, with several guest musicians, created a compelling world through sound that made the stories in Always Coming Home come even more alive. ![]() Through Barton’s expert composition, the book snaps vividly into focus. Le Guin clearly thought music was important to the Kesh people, filling the book with references to music and even inventing several musical instruments from scratch – some of which Barton has built and played on the album, including a seven-foot horn called a houmbúta and a Weosai Medoud Teyahi bone flute. ![]() The album wasn’t an add-on to Always Coming Home, but an essential sonic companion to the book. A bounty of hand-drawn, rustic illustrations by Margaret Chodos-Irvine filled out the volume, with early editions sold packaged with a cassette tape of the album. The book was a novel, a scrapbook and an imaginary anthropological study in one it was crammed with maps, stories, songs, recipes, poetry, charts and language guides. Always Coming Home was one of Le Guin’s most fascinating and underrated works: a sprawling exploration of a fictional people known as the Kesh, who lived in northern California hundreds of years in the future. ![]()
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