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Southern California stretches from the backyards to the desert.
By Alex Ross
On a bloody morning in Los Angeles in late January, I woke up an hour before sunrise and went to Griffith Park, a rugged expanse stretching northeast of the Hollywood Hills, five times the length of Central Park and a house on a lonely mountain. Griffith brings a shade of wild nature to urban s expansive. During the pandemic, there were more people than usual, but in the darkness of 6 a. m. there was no one there. I walked to a point where downtown Los Angeles became visible. The rains had recently arrived and the mists emerged from the vegetation, giving a steamy twinkle to the luminaires of the waking village.
During my forties, I hike at dawn, a habit that would have horrified my youngest night activist. I usually leave my phone behind, but this time I brought it with me so I could attend a music event. Since January 15, The Wild Up, based in Angels, has hosted a socially remote festival, basically online, called “Darkness Sounding,” and today’s supply was an audio stream of Andrew McIntosh’s “A Moonbeam Is Just a Filtered Ray of Sunshine,” an hour-long piece that combines instrumental sounds. with wind box recordings crossing pine stands.
The inaugural edition of “Darkness Sounding” took place last winter, both indoors and outdoors. Christopher Rountree, wild Up’s turbulent and imaginative leader, described the festival as a training in “embracing ritual, nature, space, listening and the undeniable act of being together. “The sunrise and sunset framed several performances of the series. Over the next year, this emphasis on the rhythms of sunlight hours has been applied in a way Rountree may not have foreseen. In the midst of forced inactivity, the appearance of the sun is a major event.
Blocking COVID-19 during the holidays led Wild Up to adjust its plans for this year’s edition, but the key concept remains. McIntosh’s “Moonbeam” was heard 3 consecutive days, either at sunrise and sunset. Pianist Richard Valitutto broadcast a live marathon recital from his apartment in Ithaca, New York, playing from dawn to dusk. Sound artist Chris Kallmyer built two sets of bells and sent them to visitors in the Los Angeles area. Singer Holland Andrews phoned the audience and sang for them, individually. Odeya Nini toured the city performing in front of the houses. This week, bassoon composer Archie Carey presents a sound environment walking in the Joshua Tree National Park area.
Valitutto’s recital amounted to about seven and a half hours of music, concentrated on the soft, slow end of the spectrum. Two wonderful 20th-century piano cycles, Federico Mompou’s ‘Msica Callada’ and Valentin Silvestrov’s ‘Silent Songs’, intertwined with works through Morton Feldman, Ann Southam, J rg Frey, Eva-Maria Houben, Linda Catlin Smith, Laurence Crane, etc. , a dozen more. There was an air at ease in the procedure: Valitutto stopped periodically to take a bite, chat with the audience of the live broadcast or caress his terrier mix, Goofy, who was napping on a dog bed by the piano. dexterity at an immaculate, low-volume, uninterrupted pace, as Valitutto did.
Andrews and Nini Array’s plays “There You Are” and “I See You” respectively are much more intimate. For the first, the listener receives a link to a recording on SoundCloud and, at the agreed time, Andrews calls on the phone and sings with the audio track for about ten minutes, on a hypnotic, exuberant timbre. Words are meditative and comforting, not to mention reality. “Let it be scary, ” sang Andrews. Nini accompanied me with a drone in a box of shruti. He gave me a look at “I See You” in a park near his home in Mount Washington. Her long, sinuous song, speechless but expressively sharp, owes something to the traditions of the Middle East and South Asia, also recalls Meredith Monk’s Experimental Vocalization. Nini told me it was the first time I’d been running for a stranger in almost a year.
Kallmyer’s wind carillon assignment is called “Two Hearts Are Better Than One”. There are two sets of carillons, one with five resonant aluminum tubes and the other with two; or stock up on pending redwood strikers. Each week, Kallmyer moves the bells from space to space, with reverberations in line with the audience. strangers. A set hanging over an alley in the look of a space in Studio City; the other in a garden in Altadena, next to a tangerine. The climate favorably unstable, with gusts of wind creating rains of activity. The five-tone bells sounded immediate arpeggios or collided in messy chords. Pulses: alternating immediate hooks, dotted beats, triplets.
Carey’s “Desert Sound Vi,” Joshua Tree’s paintings, is positioned on land adjacent to a bungalow in the desert. The raper puts on his headphones, starts betting a forty-minute piece and walks a path that connects five is. stone labyrinth, in which you sail like a coral bassoon unfolds slowly. The moment is a watch of sunshine; Bamboo flute tones collide smoothly as you watch the movement of the sun’s shadow. The third is an outdoor dance floor, equipped with a disco ball and a rough dance floor. In the fourth, a series of sine tones, emanating from the portable headphones and tuners fixed on the e, evoke the signals exchanged at the roots of the creosote shrubs. In the last season, for nine minutes and six moments, John Cage’s double “4-33” captures the sounds of space: birds, insects, dogs, airplanes. I’ve been thinking about the fact that many elements of synthetic music already exist in nature. The composition begins with listening.
“Moonbeam” carries the imronta of a composer in supernatural harmony with the landscapes and soundscapes of the West. McIntosh grew up in a Nevada desert, the city and climbed the mountains of the Great Basin region. Not long ago, I was listening to an interview with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who commented on the specific sounds the wind emits as it passed through other types of trees. McIntosh began making box recordings in California’s pine forests and listening to the distinctions between them. “Moonbeam” includes the sounds of the wonderful bristocons of the basin, the oldest trees in the world, which grow at maximum heights and have short needles. When the wind blows around it, it tends not to create a general ambient hum, but a more concentrated hum that runs through the forest.
In “Moonbeam”, the box recordings serve as the sound base for a complex texture that mixes violin and viola improvisations (McIntosh is a talented string performer) with shaky and whispering timbres (arc piano, arched wine glasses, arched cymbals, slate scraping). Microtonal tunings, electronic processing, and raw string attacks create fierce climaxes. Periodically, this tissue falls to reveal the underlying acoustics of the forest. “Moonbeam” is a contemplative creation that generates great tension and liberation.
My resolve to take “Moonbeam” on a walk at dawn was opposed to the spirit of the play: McIntosh intended listeners to evoke imaginary home worlds. As I had heard the paintings in the “right” way the day before, I was emboldened to bring it a little closer to the wild nature that had encouraged it. The sun gave the impression on a low embankment at a time when the violin’s high-pitched sounds shone almost silently. The mixture as beautiful as fortuitous and made me need to send the room several hundred kilometers north towards the ancient Bristlecone pine forest to see what the trees can do with it. ♦
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