Sometimes at lunch, I hear the organist practicing at the Spreckels Organ in Balboa Park. The organ is “the world’s largest outdoor instrument,” and has “more than 5,000 pipes” that are usually used to play a variety of show tunes and standard classical fare.
Episode 147 is an incantation to the great instrument, that has been underused these last months. Its pipes not adored by listeners, its tunes heard mostly by trees, buildings, and birds.
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This episode features a stereo recording of working in the yard and slow meditative synths.
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It starts with a flurry, a quickening, eventually slowing down. The strumming and pecking in the background start to become more pronounced as the anxieties lessen. The beat stops, and the feedback envelops. In the distance a melody is present, but the foreground disguises it. Sounds of a being back in public emerge, and the simple melody may have become a little out of tune.
Episode 145 of the podcast features a manipulated recording of a guitar, several midi interments, and a binaural field recording.
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In mid-August, I spent about a week camping. The majority of the time I was at Mancos State Park. There was a no-burn order for the entire state, so most nights I would sit and read and write until my solar-powered lights grew dim, listen to music via my phone while watching the stars appear in the sky, and I also would sit, drink a beer, and listen to the sounds of the park. My campsite was about two miles from the edge of the Arapaho Forest, about ten miles from Mesa Verde National Park, and an hour in the car from Durango, CO.
There are two main aspects of this piece, a stereo recording from just outside my tent, and a series of midi files. The title is from one of the reviews of the campsites, a very apt description.
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The piece centers on the repetitive nature of daily life, and even when the world is fragmented, seemingly destroyed, there is hope that it can be repaired, and restored. Based on “The Sow took the Measles” a folk song from colonial New England. The original verse tells of Yankee practical idealism, of making good out of a bad situation.
Featuring field recordings, synthesized instruments, and digital signal manipulation.
This is part one and an interlude of an album of the same name. Please visit my bandcamp page to purchase the entire album.
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As the world slides sideways, episode 135 of the podcast focuses on a collage of closeup and foley recordings, with occasional accompaniment by computer synthesized contrabass and tuba. The recordings include: opening a can of seltzer, pouring water, semi-rhythmic rubbing and tapping glass and cardboard, opening kitchen cabinet doors, futzing with a tape measure and cordless drill.
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In an experiment on the Moon, Apollo 15 Commander David Scott, dropped a geological hammer and a falcon feather simultaneously*. I can’t imagine Galileo ever considered that his thought experiment would be realized, or maybe that’s what he was thinking about in the fall of 1609 when was looking at the moon through his telescope and created, in watercolor, the first realistic depictions of the moon in human history*.
Episode 134 of the podcast features recordings from the moon (Apollo/NASA), recordings from earth (boat ride, coffee shop, and driving on a highway), sounds made on my computer (a Roland TR-606 drum machine emulation, and a computer assisted composition: flute, clarinet, and piano).
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An old song on a computer generated piano; a theme from a 1950’s instructional video; miscellaneous bits, clicks and static; unintelligible voices; a river; a slow bell.
This episode continues to collage together samples and sounds as an accompaniment to a melody based on the folk songs, this episode features The Avondale Mine Disaster.
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