Of Silos, Tanks and Caves: Finding Music in All the Odd Places
Inpiration can come from all sorts of places. In the new episode of the Right Brain Music Podcast we meet three visionary artists who’ve taken this lterally. They’ve made unique recordings in an adandoned grain silo, the interior of a famous bridge, a salvaged water treatment tank and a bunch of caves in Great Britain. Listen to the episode here:
The first of our guests is Lea Bertucci. She describes herself as an “organizer of sound".” Based in New York City, she is a multi-instrumentalist, recording artist, producer and designer of multi-media installations. Lea first drew our attention with her album, Resonant Field, which she recorded in the awe-inspiring interior space of a grain elevator in Buffalo, NY. When you listen, it’s hard to identify the sounds, which originate with her saxophone and reverberate in the massive concrete structure. The result and the story behind the recording are fascinating.
Lea also made a field-based recording called Acoustic Shadows, recorded in the interior of the Deutzer Bridge in Koln, Germany. This music incorporated live musicians combined with the reverberating sounds of vehicles and the surrounding city in a perfromance/installation. Hear the story in the interview.
By the way, Lea has a new imminent release called A Visible Length of Light. Learn about that here.
Lea Bertucci’s recording setup at the Marine A Grain Elevator in Silo City. Note the simplicity - her horn and 2 mics.
A view upward into the concrete sound chamber.
Next, we zipline to Manchester, England, across the Atlantic sea. Meet experimental sound designer Dave Clarkson. He makes intriguing creations from field recordings and other sources in his home studio. He’s been prominent in the local music scene since the 1980s. We focused on his album A Pocket Guide to Subterrania - Mysterious Caves of the British Isles. Dave visited a half dozen caves in various locales, captured the sounds and then used them to assemble compositions. Learn about his process and hear his remarkable work in the interview.
Dave Clarkson in his studio. To the right are two of the caves where he recorded.
Church Cove in Corwall.
White Scar Cave in Yorkshire.
Our third sonic destination in this podcast episode is a place called The Tank in Rangely, Colorado. It’s called that for a practical reason - it is a tank, a large metal structure created as a water treatment facility, later abandoned and still later re-purposed as a recording studio (properly The Tank Center for Sonic Arts) due to its bizarre acoustic properties. We meet cellist James Hoskins (also part of Right Brain Records artists Spontanea and Dodd-Hoskins), who recorded there after The Tank’s renovation and official approval for conversion from a storage tank to an assembly hall. We include excerpts of his resulting album Inception, unlike anything you’ve heard with a cello. It’s an amazing story with amazing music to match. Listen to the episode.
An interesting side note: the featured piece “Dreaming of Whales” was composed by Joseph Lukasik using audio clips of James from inside the Tank; he processed it with a granular synthesizer. It’s a cool use of technology to accentuate acoustic ally generated sounds.
James Hoskins, left, and an aerial view of The Tank, above.
For more information on these artists, follow the links here:
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