Biography
The Story of Borful Tang is a long and strange one. It defies belief but I present it to you as truth in this condensed form. He is a being from another time and another place; a place not of this Earth but another world.In that world, Borful Tang was one of the legendary hill herders and a musician of great renown. Hill herding was a mysterious profession, the art known only to a few, passed down from master to apprentice. He shepherded the hills from one region to another across the vast plains of the world, communicating and moving them through sound.In his rambling home atop one of the larger hills, he crafted instruments that produced huge complex swathes of sound. Some of them resembled the giant horns used by the Tibetans in our world, while others were large, intricate wooden contraptions capable of playing repeated, interweaving patterns. Borful would send forth mighty volleys of drones and cascading notes, and the hills would lift slowly up with a great cracking of stone and earth. As a hill shuffled onward, another would come in and settle on the abandoned ground. In this slow, stately manner he roamed the plains with his flock.More socially minded than the traditional hill herder, Borful would often look in on the towns and cities that existed on the edges of the great plains and listen to their different musics. As he absorbed the sounds from these disparate cultures, he became intrigued with the idea of performance and composition. He combined these new ideas and melodies with elements of his hill sound, creating a uniquely powerful music. He began performing this music and so his legend grew.However, there was great turmoil coming to the world. At the height of his fame, a group of lords in league with dark forces of great mystical power, splintered off from the democratic governing body and took control of that world in a violent coup. They opened a portal between their world and ours here on Earth. Undetected by the governing bodies of our planet, they used the Slave Birds to capture humans and bring them back through the portal to work in their immense ore mines. They grew rich and powerful, ruling their world with a ruthless single-minded quest for power.The lords knew the legend of the hill herders and that of Borful Tang. They wanted control of the ancient hills for themselves but Borful alone, resisted. With some renegade human slaves, he took the hills into battle against the lords, but their power was too great. He was forced to retreat, only to be caught by the Slave Birds and brought through the portal to Earth.Borful Tang remains here in exile, his life as a hill herder snatched away. He finds solace in his music. He cannot craft the instruments he once played with the available materials on our world. but he has learned how to utilize the technology of our time to at least continue his musical path.There is far more to this tale than can be explained in this brief text. As he reveals his story to me, so I shall share it with you. Thank you for listening.Dominic CrampSNURPJuly, 2005
