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As the pandemic ravages our lives, we find ourselves valuing simple pleasures. The ambient compositions in this album are a personal reflection of this time.
NB This music is best experienced at a moderate level over good speakers or with headphones.
“There is… the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul… the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos,” Paul Goodman wrote in his 1972 taxonomy of the nine kinds of silence. “But where does the modern soul go to pasture on awareness and commune with the cosmos in a civilization increasingly savaged by noise?”
Open your ears and allow yourself to step into this sound world. Close your eyes and be enveloped by the sound.
NB This music is best experienced on good speakers or with headphones.
A pale cold glow of the sun tints the early morning landscape with barely visible light. The newly uncovered architecture of trees etches the snowy hillside. It’s as if for a moment, sound and light are fused.
A pale cold glow of the sun tints the early morning landscape with barely visible light. The newly uncovered architecture of trees, etches the snowy hillside. It’s as if for a moment, sound and light are fused.
The connections between sound, emotion, and memory are very strong. This is a collection of soundscape compositions that conjures these pale wisps of memory.
The connections between sound, emotion, and memory are very strong. The sibilant hiss of wind in the trees or a warbling bird song can trigger our cellular memory of a specific time and place." from an august evening" is a collection of soundscape compositions that conjures these pale wisps of memory.
"From an August Evening" is composed using a field recording of Fernald Nature Preserve during a warm August evening. The insect choruses create an ambient accompaniment for imagined spirit voices.
"What the Bees Know" was written to accompany my visual art contribution to the group exhibition “Mind Gardens” at Caza/Sikes Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. This composition is based on field recordings of beehives and explores the massed sounds of individual bees.
"A Barn in Halifax" is a soundscape composition comprised of a field recording of my family’s barn in Halifax, Pennsylvania. The creaks and groans of the structure provide a polyphony of percussive sounds to the background ambiance.
"One Afternoon in Randall Hollow" is based on the soundscape of Randall Hollow in Tioga State Forest in Pennsylvania. It is perhaps, one of the quietest locations in the Pennsylvania Wilds. This is a meditation on my memory of that special place.
*Thanks to Dale Myers, Scott Bruno, and Rob McCullough for their valuable assistance.
A quiet ambient soundscape-based composition.
A photograph of a milkweed pod in an early Spring snowstorm initiated the music for Milkweed Nebula. At first glance, it looks more like an image of the cosmos than a milkweed pod covered in melting snow. It’s a compelling image for me. I imagined how a movie score would sound if I were composing it for a movie based on this image? I decided to find out by producing this ambient work.
I began by recording the milkweed stalks in the wind with a contact microphone. This field recording became a kind of cantus firmus for this work. I composed an ambient work to correspond with this imagined soundscape.
Winter Meadow, the companion piece in this album, is based on a field recording of winter meadow grasses in the wind. The synthesized accompaniment for this piece was composed to evoke the cold gray-brown texture of a winter meadow.
An ambient reflection of the Super Blood Wolf Moon of 2019.
The Super Blood Wolf Moon occurred on the clear cold night of January 20th in Southwestern Ohio. The full moon in January has long been known as the Wolf Moon. In 2019 it was referred to as the “Super Blood Wolf Moon.” An optical illusion happens because a lunar eclipse of the full moon occurs at the same time it reaches its closest point to Earth in its orbit.
The month of January is also a time of personal reflection when the past year is remembered and thoughts about the upcoming year are filled with hope and expectation.
"Blood Wolf Moon" is an ambient reflection of these things.