Weeklybeats is a 52 week long music project in which artists compose and publicly release 1 song a week for the entire year.
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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]

Very nice sounding percussions into this.

Really enjoyed this. The percussion is really great, and it blends really well with the melody. Love the imagery you mentioned in your description, too; it fits!

It's cool to hear some "exotic" instruments.  I'm not familiar at all with steel tongue drums, but it sounds really nice.  I can totally picture hearing this coming from a distant campfire.

This sounds so real and good. I am completely flashed. It has a nice groove to it and a decent melody going on in the background. Beautiful number 42.

Fantastic, all the way through and I loved your track description.

djippy wrote:

Very nice sounding percussions into this.

Hey thanks much, glad you liked! You're a drummer too right? Appreciate that from a fellow percussion person!

hent03 wrote:

Really enjoyed this. The percussion is really great, and it blends really well with the melody. Love the imagery you mentioned in your description, too; it fits!

Oh cool, glad you like the imagery, I was in a little silly mood at the time I think. Or just a good mood. Glad you found the percusssion blended ok too. It's percussion heavy, but I like it that way.

CosmicCairns wrote:

It's cool to hear some "exotic" instruments.  I'm not familiar at all with steel tongue drums, but it sounds really nice.  I can totally picture hearing this coming from a distant campfire.

Awesome, thanks. Yeah these are kind of exotic indeed. Looking forward to playing at a distant campfire someday!

Q-Rosh wrote:

This sounds so real and good. I am completely flashed. It has a nice groove to it and a decent melody going on in the background. Beautiful number 42.

Wow, thanks so much, glad you liked it, I appreciate the comment.

fetalface wrote:

Fantastic, all the way through and I loved your track description.

Hey, thanks so much! Glad you liked the description too. Had a little fun with that. Was glad to discover your music this week, thanks for comment.

I'm sure somehow this can tie into the story.

It's fun up close as well.

Damn you have a nice collection of drums and percussion.  I've always wanted a talking drum ever since hearing the Black Panther score.  Also instagram keeps telling me I want a tongue drum (with their random ads).  They look really fun to play.  This was a fun jam to listen to.  I can imagine it must be pretty easy to get lost in a long jam with the tongue drum.  Well done!

Love the story behind this, you can feel the energy of the session in the music, this was a real pleasure to listen to, very calming and can hear the curiosity/mystery in the music.

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