Aether Chimes
The Best Choice For Studying
Mark Rushton’s Interpolation in the Arts is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.
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This week’s topics:
Aether Chimes
The Future of Music According to Ryuichi Sakamoto
Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto + Ensemble Modern - “UTP 2”
Aether Chimes
Last weekend, my wife and I drove to Lamoni, Iowa, to visit the “Amish Country Store” to maybe buy some wind chimes.
Having lived within 10 miles of the Amish in Eastern Iowa for over 15 years, this store was “Amish” in name only.
What kind of “Amish” store has a Tesla charging station in the parking lot? There were no parking spots for buggies. LED lights instead of gas lights. No places where the horses could have been. Inside, the store was playing A Flock of Seagulls at too-high of a volume.
They did have the chimes. Lots of them. I bought two sets. After driving home, I went to Guitar Center and bought a drum kit cymbal stand with a boom arm - perfect for hanging wind chimes inside so they can be manually played.
While I’ve made music I call “chiming ambient”, I’ve always wanted to have a set of actual chimes to use in my music.
I record the playing of the chimes into an audio recorder, and then I run the audio file back through my effects boxes to transform the chimes with electronics.
The first of these tracks is “Aether Chimes” by Meditative Drift, to be released on the streamers on April 7th, but out on Bandcamp.
The Future of Music According to Ryuichi Sakamoto
It’s less than two minutes.
What would Beethoven do?
Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto + Ensemble Modern - “UTP, Part 2”
When my oldest daughter was 12, I took her to a recital of John Cage compositions that her French horn tutor was involved with. It had the typical “prepared piano” with forks and other things in there. Radios. Odd instruments. They did 4’33. She thought it was great. And, of course, so did I.
I always wanted to do something like this Alva Noto / Ryuichi Sakamoto / Ensemble Modern sound: electronics and classical instruments, but in a “musique concrete” way. And light effects.
It’s what I call “accessible avant-garde”.
In Iowa, the audience for this sort of thing is microscopic or worse. I don’t really know anybody to handle the orchestral instruments. So few notes are being played here, I could manage to do most of it myself. But that’s a lot of work for a “microscopic or worse” audience. That’s why I’m studio-bound these days.