Distant Tongues
By miraclemiles on October 18, 2020 11:16 pm
This week I take a break from chronicling the adventures of our oscillating time travelers and their tacos, birds and presidents. But fear not, they will be back soon with more adventures. I hear they recently had some strange alien encounters with something called pokemons.
Until then, I explore a new instrument: a steel tongue drum. It arrived from the far away land they call Russia a week ago. In that time I have pittered and pattered, thwipped and thwopped about on its D Celtic Minor tuned tongues. In doing so, it has brought me great peace. We have become friends. To capture the fruits of our budding friendship, I turned on a video camera and placed a microphone just so. Then let the pitters patter and the thwipps thwop in a joyful improvisaton. Who was playing who? A conversation.
To create this song, I took a cohesive 5 minute section of my session, pulled some loops here and there, and kept a few longer phrases as I played them. Brought other friends out to play: cajon, djembe, talking drum. We laughed into the night. Some other sounds emerged in Live, percussion mostly. Some low-end synths. A zeze stringed instrument from Africa (sampled instrument released by Behr), and pitched tabla samples. I think this is the beginning of great friendship.
I plan on sharing a version of this, possibly the whole 5 minute improvisation, for the Disquiet Junto project: a weekly music project with themes. This weeks theme is: "From a Distance, make music intended to be heard from afar," along with percussion, for that project. I imagine walking along in a meadow approaching a forest, and hearing these sounds being played by a campfire off in the distance.
This is the full improvised recording:
[soundcloud]914187340[/soundcloud]
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)