DOORS:: 7:30p
SHOW:: 8:00p

Heavy Snow Stood on the Blackened Wall

Program Notes ::

This composition, primarily made of voice, bagpipes, field recordings, and contact microphone feedback invites listeners to find their bearings in an imaginary landscape. This audio collage was made with episodic prose and mythic tales in mind, dense with soaring skyward cries and drones as well as downward-pulling, jagged, and corrosive sonic textures.

“Heavy Snow Stood on the Blackened Wall” was woven together from the physicality and tactility of performances on acoustic instruments such as the bagpipes and voice in addition to experimentation with sculptural contact microphone instruments. I am especially interested in all of these instrument’s capacity for drone, duration, and microtonal shifting because of the way these features challenge the space and attention of the listener.

The sound’s own limitations and points of degradation are on display as well. I am interested in the point at which sounds that were once easily recognizable lose key features or characteristics that place them within a soundscape. My process involves over-driven and distorted signal processing, the chopping and jolting sensation of magnetic tape loops or weak radio signal, and the layered arrangement of recordings positioned outside of their expected contexts. I am inspired by the immortal dance between recorded sound that illustrates the ecosystem the recording was taken from and those that foreground the hand of the artist/recordist. I favor the kind of extended deep listening that is possible within spatial long form works because they enable me to focus on transition points from species to habitat to whole.

Accumulating faster, the drunken sky splits open and pours down, indifferent to the land below. Like star dust, like the spinal vertebra of tiny animals, snow flakes find each other magnetically and join the ocean of their mass. Each grain, whispering landing coordinates, finds rest on the wall. Barely upright, this derelict monolith cannot deny its company and swells, stirs, then simmers.
Some sessions used in this composition were done in collaboration with artist and vocalist Baptiste Leroux.