Media

Here are some songs from Metra: A Climate Revolution with Songs!
Featuring Cherrye J Davis, Rebecca Ana Peña, Corinna Schulenberg, Sierra Rein, Kayla Coleman, and Ned Hartford.

Track 1: Change the Myth — A chorus of tree nymphs set the stage.

Track 2: Cascade — A thirty-year journey through climate collapse. Shit gets bad.

Track 3: Metra’s Mother — Ovid left some important details out of the myth of King Erysicthon and his daughter Metra. Aglaphonos fills us in.

Track 4: Welcome Mythmakers! — The night before the revolution begins, Cori, Aglaphonos, and Sam welcome their co-conspirators.

Track 5: Cori’s Pep Talk — Cori’s gives the revolutionaries a pep talk.

Track 6: King Erysicthon and the Curse of Ceres — The King cuts down a sacred forest dedicated to the goddess Ceres, killing all her tree nymphs living in the trees. Ceres gets pissed and sends Famine to pay Erysicthon a visit.

Track 7: Bechtel Man — Welcome to the World Economic Forum at Davos: where climate change panels are led by oil execs, and the best advice is how to make money off the coming apocalypse! Yay!

Track 8: Cori’s Fabulous Rebirth — Wonder how the youngest black female hedge fund owner in history becomes a motherf*cking climate revolutionary?

Tracks were recorded at MythMakers Studio in Brooklyn, NY. All songs by Ned Hartford. Tracks produced by Ned Hartford.

Cherrye J. Davis as Cori in the Flux Theatre Ensemble production of Metra. Photo by Isaiah Tanenbaum Theatrical Photography.

Download the Metra Packet

A note from the composer:

“Metra deals with how our culture’s belief systems have led us to climate catastrophe, and how we need to embrace new and better belief systems if we hope to survive.

That’s a complicated topic!

And, at the same time, Em and I wanted Metra to be massively entertaining, funny, dramatic, and tuneful.

AND we wanted it to be (relatively) cheap to develop and produce. And reproduce! The cast is 7 actors and 1 guitarist.

But magic is an integral element to the show, and I believed the music had to have that element.

So, in preparation for the show’s first production, I put together a guitar pedal rig featuring loopers and stereo effects, controlled via MIDI. This enabled the single guitarist to create vast, elaborate soundscapes interwoven with the songs—live, on stage.

And, using the pedals’ proprietary software, that set of presets, that ‘score,’ is preserved for future productions. So, those lush soundscapes can continue to be reproduced by a single guitarist and a set of pedals.

I really want to thank Strymon Engineering for their crucial help in putting my rig together, and for all their support of Metra.

Change the myth, change the world!”

Ned Hartford, 2023