WATER MUSIC

As an installation artist, I feel sound recordings are an integral part of taking advantage of the gallery space... and of course, all the more of cyberspace galleries. Thus I offer here Water Music I, the first piece of a work in progress.

About a year ago, I had a very pleasant dream that I was being given a guided tour, by a group of 'hip industrialists,' through a giant, sprawling industrial complex. As we traveled through this ever-changing interior landscape, the sound quality of the roaring, torrential rain outside was modulated by the different spaces and materials. (And It had actually begun to rain torrentially on the roof of the room in which I slept, and would rain non-stop for several days.) Now we would pass through a smaller, metallic chamber, now into a hangar-sized building of stone, through corridors, glass faced lobbies and factories. As we moved, the muted noise of the rain changed constantly. I was preoccupied with the desire, while still dreaming, to make a piece of music that mimicked this effect, and I began to think of a plan for recreating it. (I'm still in the process of making various on-site recordings and mixing these into this particular final piece.)

I would have a series of dreams about this project, but only the second, which occured the very next night, while it was still raining, seems particularly relevant: I was with the same group of people, but we visited a number of other structures which incorporated water: we partied outside a mansion, the back part of which was an elaborate, open fountain spilling into well-kept gardens, with a number of "subfountains" containing luminous, membranous egg-like structures in different pools which produced different tones when touched, and we toured a flooded school full of debris-laden water up to our knees. At the end of this dream, my companions took me outside the school, into the rain, and bid me farewell. The last thing I heard in the dream, just before waking, was the the booming, disembodied phrase: "listen to the water people."

Oddly, I'm still not sure about the specific sense of this phrase, whether it was meant as a suggestion that "you should listen to the water, all you people" or if it names a specific group of people—"The Water People," and is instructing me to listen to them, whoever, or whatever, they may be, or both. Regardless, within moments of waking I had adopted "The Water People" as a title for a new and larger project: a CD of music created entirely from the sounds produced by water. But I conceptualized these as pieces of music, not just simple acoustic recordings. They should be both: a hybridization, a morphing of natural water sounds into music. With the existing computer technology I had, I knew I could twist and reshape, stretch and compress, modulate and process, and actually give specific pitch and order to these sounds.

Water Music I is the first completed piece of this project. The piece is very subtle and takes its own time, it may require more than one listen (in headphones, I suggest) to begin to hear the melodies, rhythms and harmonies emerge. Every sound you hear in this piece originated with the acoustic sounds of manipulated water: some are more or less natural and some are extended to include the technological artifacts of some rather intensely recursive processing. Remarkably, by condensing the elements of these acoustic recordings into "quantized pitches" through various ad hoc means, the piece became naturally and automatically, if subtly, musical, with its own miniature tensions between layers, its own climaxes and denouements. It also stands as a good impression of the qualities of sound in these dream landscapes... but it's only the beginning of exploring these possibilities.

You can explore more of my recent music here

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