Hello Good Bye Are You Satisfied

 Hello Good Bye / Are You Satisfied
Memorial Re-Arrangement and Cover Interpretation
Music, Lyrics, Montage, and Interdisciplinary Media Work by Donald Morin

Following the tragic passing of acclaimed Indigenous cellist and interdisciplinary artist Cris Derksen, I revisited and re-arranged portions of my earlier songs Hello Good Bye and Are You Satisfied as a memorial reflection on grief, memory, spirituality, human connection, and artistic survival.

The original compositions and lyrical structures emerge from multiple artistic periods spanning more than four decades of songwriting, theatre, interdisciplinary performance, filmmaking, spoken word, and visual montage practice.

Hello Good Bye traces back to my earliest experiences working in Vancouver film production during the early 1980s while appearing in Robert Boyd’s independent film Hello Goodbye. Out of that creative period emerged a reflective song concerning fleeting encounters, longing, emotional distance, and temporary human connection.

The second lyrical layer, Are You Satisfied, emerged from my 1986 interdisciplinary fantasy stage work Slow Down Order, developed during the social and cultural atmosphere surrounding Expo 86 in Vancouver. The play explored commodification, spectacle culture, authoritarian psychology, colonial structures, and the growing emotional fragmentation of modern life.

From that theatrical work emerged the recurring refrain:

“Are you satisfied?”

Years later, portions of this material evolved further through the multimedia theatre/music work Indians and Dogs with the late Jimy Sidlar, whose musical presence helped transform the material into a more emotionally open and communal performance structure.

The emotional center of the medley deepened further during the 1990s through melodic material composed for Danielle Pruski following a devastating accident that profoundly affected my family and those close to her. Danielle later passed away in 2015 after many years in long-term care. These newer arrangements therefore became memorial reflections not only for Cris Derksen, but also for Danielle and all absent from the body.

For this reinterpretation, I created new score excerpts using notation software based on portions of the original compositions, then experimented with contemporary AI-assisted music tools to generate expanded instrumental and vocal arrangements from my original melodic and lyrical material.

Rather than replacing authorship, the technology became another artistic instrument within the evolving creative process — similar to editing, montage, synthesis, theatre, or cinematic collage.

The newer cover versions therefore exist beside the original recordings as alternate emotional interpretations of the same underlying songs.

Additional instrumentation layered into portions of the original arrangements was intentionally designed to create a softer, angelic atmosphere. During the closing passages — “the creator will be with you soon,” “pray, pray, pray,” and “our hearts are with you night and day” — the work gradually shifts away from critique and sorrow toward comfort, compassion, transcendence, and spiritual release.

As Willy Frencheater says in my film Seven Fires 4 U Kitchi Manitou:

“There is nothing more immediate than the immediate.”

This work was created in that same spirit of immediacy — art responding directly to grief, memory, technological culture, and the fragile emotional realities of the present moment.

Please note: portions of the score montage were manually aligned by eye to the newer AI-assisted audio interpretation. Some score transitions and visual timings may not perfectly synchronize throughout the piece, but I wanted to preserve the immediacy and emotional process of the work rather than over-polish it into something emotionally distant.

As an independent Indigenous interdisciplinary artist working with limited resources, I continue adapting older songwriting, theatre, film, and visual materials into new forms using both traditional and emerging technologies.

The imperfections within the montage are therefore also part of the living creative process itself — memory, reconstruction, grief, experimentation, and artistic survival unfolding in real time.

This final montage combines:
• original songwriting
• score excerpts
• AI-assisted reinterpretation
• visual montage
• family archive imagery
• spirituality
• Indigenous imagery
• and interdisciplinary media practice

as part of an ongoing artistic and memorial process.

In memory of Cris Derksen, Danielle Pruski, Jimy Sidlar, and all absent from the body.