Tag: overtones

Daniel Lentz – Missa Umbrarum, 1985

Another progressive and very beautiful collection of compositions from undersung genius Daniel Lentz. Missa Umbrarum, or “mass of shadows,” is named in part for its use of 118 “sonic shadows” in the title piece, produced using a 30 second tape delay technique. It was originally written in 1973, and a first version of “O-Ke-Wa” was written for eight voices in 1974, so I’d assume that “Postludium” was written around the same time. Though it includes a singing of the Agnus Dei, the piece explores similar tonal territory to “Lascaux,” which appears on his excellent On The Leopard Altar as well as on some later releases of Missa Umbrarum.

A mystical invocation of the Christian Last Supper, much of the titular mass employs a severe, fixated kind of devotional singing that makes me think of Geinoh Yamashirogumi, though it also includes wine glass resonance, with the pitches shifting as the singers drink. On the first repetition of a phrase, the lowest notes of the segment are played, and then the singers drink from the glasses before adding the next layer at a higher pitch. Though there are only eight voices in the piece, between this layering technique and the use of the tape delay “sonic shadows,” we eventually end up with a very large choir, cut through with the weightless ring of the glasses. Lentz has long been interested in both the sonic and aesthetic value of wine in performance–please refer to this bananas interview for more information.

The other two pieces are gentler, more pillowing explorations of vocal dialogue, the soft bubbling percussion of Native American bone rasps, and an even more expansive wine glass resonance that very much evokes a cathedral full of sound. When asked about the closing piece in an interview, Lentz had this to say:

Interviewer: “O-ke-wa (North American Eclipse),” a piece for multiple voices, drum, bone rasps and bells, is based on the O-ke-wa, the Seneca Native American dance for the dead. Ritual appears to be implicit to this 1974 piece in terms of structure and explicit in terms of performance.

Lentz: In [both versions of “O-ke-wa”], each singer is a soloist having his / her own text and melody. The melodies become the harmonies via the singers extending the notes of each of their melodies. It’s to be performed with the performers moving around the listeners, allowing individual lyrics and music to always be somewhere else when it sounds again. It is also how the original O-ke-wa dance was done in the Seneca Native American death ceremony – usually from dusk to dawn for them. The ritual element of this piece is very important to me, as it is for “Missa Umbrarum.” I am a small part Seneca, briefly a Catholic as well. The piece works best in a resonant environment.

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Janet Bray & Edie Hartshorne – The Mystery Within, 1988

Super bare bones meditative instrumentals. Ocarina, Tibetan bells and bowls, bamboo flutes, and koto. I haven’t been able to confirm a release year, but my  best guess is 1988. It looks as if the pair later released a record with a similar tracklisting in 2010, though the songs that have the same titles as these seem like modified versions. Predictably gorgeous room tone. I love how intimately you can hear the inhales and exhales of the flutist–despite being recorded in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, there are moments where, rather than feeling drowned in cavernous echo, you feel as if you’re sitting a few inches away from the musician. From the liner notes:

We only use the pure sounds of instruments wrought from the earth: clay, wood, bamboo, precious metals. As we performed in the Cathedral, we experienced an interplay between the instruments and the reverberation of the Cathedral itself, as if the Cathedral were a sacred instrument.

The Tibetan bowls have been used in Buddhist meditations for many centuries. The ocarina, also called “huaca” in the Andes, means “breath of spirit.” In the Andean burial grounds, huacas call forth the Divine and assist the passage of souls to the next world.

The Japanese koto, a 13 stringed instrument made of Paulownia wood, came to Japan in the 8th century from China. The four-foot-long side-blown bamboo flute has only four finger holes, and uses the same pentatonic scale as the shakuhachi. We use Eastern as well as Western musical scales.

Edie Hartshorne has lived and studied in Japan, Europe, and South America, and has played Japanese and Western music for over 25 years. She uses music to create group rituals and ceremonies, and sacred spaces for individuals. She works with poets and artists exploring the synthesis of music, image, and words.

Janet Bray has worked with sacred sound for over 30 years in music and healing. She synthesizes disciplines of music, Ashtanga yoga, meditation, dream work and integrative hypnotherapy. Janet’s commitment is to guide those who seek inner growth and harmony.

If you liked this very good singing bowl cassette, you’ll probably like this. Thank you Sounds of the Dawn for the tip!

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Daniel – Quartz Crystal Bells, 1988

Pristine crystal overtones. Most of this moves at glacial speeds, with a few stretches of more active composition. While singing bowls go back hundreds of years, crystal singing bowls (made from silica quartz) weren’t manufactured until the mid-80s when they were used to grow silicon computer chips. They weren’t marketed as healing instruments until the early 90s, meaning Quartz Crystal Bells is one of the pioneering recordings of crystal singing bowls. Recorded live on a set of twelve bowls between 8″ and 18″ in diameter, with Daniel Lauter as well as Donna Soszynski and Kim Atkinson on the bowls, and recorded by Bernard Xolotl (reminder to post some Bernard Xolotl).

This is a decent quality tape rip with some room tone, but if you like it I’d highly recommend buying a re-mastered version directly from Daniel, which is divided up into five tracks rather than two sides.

[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 7: Voices Special

I made a two hour mix for NTS Radio of songs with vocals that are significant to me. I had originally set out to focus on experimental vocals, but I realized that so much of what might sound experimental to western ears—Tibetan chant, Inuit throat singing, Chinese folk—is deeply traditional, not experimental at all. Instead, I approached this as two hours of vocal milestones, be they from technical, stylistic, or emotive standpoints. It’s not possible to make a two hour comprehensive survey of strong vocal traditions, nor of the most important singers, though there are quite a few of both categories in here. Putting this together was hard, and while I could easily have spent years digging and rethinking, I set a month time limit to ensure that I would finish it at all.

As I was making this I also thought a lot about how Björk framed her almost entirely vocal record Medúlla as a response to September 11th–both the event itself and the subsequent wave of patriotism and xenophobia that she experienced as a foreigner living in New York. Making an all-vocal album was, for her, a coping mechanism and a means of trying to reconnect with what it means to be a human.

Lastly, a note that this isn’t as listenable or poppy as the mixes that I typically make, though I did try to arc it in a way that feels good. I’m not really sure what its ideal listening environment is–it probably involves headphones–so I hope that you enjoy it all the same! If you’d like an mp3 version you can download it here. Thank you for listening 💜

Tracklist:
1. The Impressions – For Your Precious Love
2. Meredith Monk – Strand (Gathering)
3. Geinoh Yamashirogumi – Genesis (abridged)
4. Bessie Griffin & The Gospel Pearls – Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child
5. Philippine Madrigal Singers – Pamugun (comp. Francisco Feliciano)
6. Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes – Jusqu’à Ce Que La Force De T’aimer Me Manque (excerpt)
7. Emma Kirkby & Gothic Voices – O Euchari (comp. Hildegard von Bingen)
8. Björk – Pleasure Is All Mine
9. The Ronettes – Baby I Love You (Isolated Vocals) (excerpt)
10. David Hykes & The Harmonic Choir – Arc Descents
11. Unknown Artists – Sumi Yeinyo (Hani Crying Song) (Southern China)
12. The Beach Boys – Surfer Girl (Alternate Version)
13. John Jacob Niles – Go ‘Way From My Window
14. The Tallis Scholars – Spem In Alium, Motet for 40 Voices (comp. Thomas Tallis)
15. Geinoh Yamashirogumi – Doll’s Polyphony
16. Young Thug – All Over
17. Ghédalia Tazartès – Une Voix S’en Va
18. Yma Sumac – Taita Inty (Virgin Of The Sun God)
19. Arthur Miles – Lonely Cowboy, Pt. 2
20. Angkanang Kunchai With Ubon-Pattana Band – Isan Lam Plearn (excerpt)
21. The Hilliard Ensemble – Viderunt Omnes (comp. Pérotin)
22. Ustad Ghulam Ali & Asha Bhosle – Salona Sa Sajan Hai Aur Main Hoon
23. Patti Page – Confess (excerpt)
24. Monks of Gyütö Tantric College – Sangwa Düpa (excerpt)
25. Amália Rodrigues – Gaivota (excerpt)
26. Unknown Artist – Akazehe Par Une Jeune Fille (Burundi)
27. Anna Homler & Steve Moshier – Sirens (excerpt)
28. Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir – Stani Mi, Maytcho (Get Up, My Daughter)
29. David Hykes & The Harmonic Choir – Rainbow Voice
30. Lucy Amarualik & Mary Sivuarapik – Song Of A Cooking Seal Flipper
31. Dr. Octagon – Halfsharkalligatorhalfman
32. Judy Henske & Jerry Yester – Rapture (excerpt)
33. The Hilliard Ensemble – Sabbato Sancto – Responsorium 5 (comp. Carlo Gesualdo)
34. Linda Jones – Your Precious Love (excerpt)

Raul Lovisoni & Francesco Messina – Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo, 1979

Such a special record. Split between Raul Lovisoni, whose work I don’t know too much about, and Francesco Messina (there’s a track from his very strange and very good Medio Occidentale on this mix). The A-side is a 24 minute long synthesizer bath, with swaths of meandering piano on top (there’s definitely something harp-like happening too, though it’s not listed in the credits). It sounds like a hot spring in the wintertime, with synth pads acting as clouds of rising steam. The B side is two ~10 minute tracks by Lovisoni, both very different from the A-side and from each other. “Hula Om” feels markedly more “indoors” than Messina’s cosmic title track. It’s just a repeating harp motif, though at a few points you can hear bird sounds filtering through a window, something being dropped in the next room, clothing shifting around, and the creak of somebody’s knees, all of which feel fitting given the raw and warm spatial textures that bring three seemingly disparate tracks together. The closer, “Amon Ra,” also a Lovisoni composition, is mostly clear, ringing overtones courtesy of a crystallophone, with some sparse patches of vocal chanting. The embrace of truthful, unedited sound, both across the synthetic landscape of the A-side and the acoustic sparsity of the B-side, makes Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo feel like a diary or a photo album: these are bare bones, beautiful songs as they happened, where they happened, and that’s more than enough.

Karma Moffett – Sitting Still Within / Sitting Still Without, 1982

 
Guest post by Gaurav Bashyakarla (Beer on The Rug)

This cassette was gifted to me by a very close friend in 2011 after returning from travels through the great state of California. The album was originally digitized with the intention of being shared on the Crystal Vibrations blog around the time it went defunct. Unfortunately it never saw the light of day there but is here now for your listening pleasure.

The sounds, frequencies and overtones on this tape lend themselves to a stillness of mind and chakra activation/harmonization. Just listen and you will see/feel.

David Hykes & the Harmonic Choir – Hearing Solar Winds, 1983

“This recording was made in L’Abbaye du Thoronet, a 12th-century Cisterian monastery in Provence, where I had previously brought the choir in 1978. The simple harmonic geometry of the abbey seemed perfectly proportioned to magnify the choir’s music and let it resonate within its sacred space. Working there was an incredible challenge: our sensations, our breathing, and even our thoughts and emotions became intensely amplified.”

–David Hykes, liner notes

Hearing Solar Winds is a milestone for the human voice. Much of Hykes’s work originates from Tantric Tibetan Buddhism and western Mongolian khöömi, or overtone singing. Yet in this context, recorded live in a French abbey over the course of two evenings, it’s a completely different beast from traditional throat singing. It’s less active and more drawn out, less human and more ghostly. It shimmers–did a songbird get trapped in the abbey, or was someone playing an unimaginably tiny glass flute? “Telescoping,” and of course “Rainbow Voice,” quite literally sound like light being split through a prism: when producing harmonics, “the voice acts as a kind of sonic prism, ‘refracting’ sound along a frequency spectrum which extends upward from the fundamental tone.”

Elsewhere, Hearing Solar Winds is as much about sonic illusion as it is overtones. Several tracks employ the Shepard scale, which is a “sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves, with the base pitch of the tone moving upward or downward. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower. It has been described as a ‘sonic barber’s pole.'” Upon first listen, the effect is disorienting and even a bit nauseating, as it’s difficult to understand where you are, tonally. If you don’t mind losing track of your body, Hearing Solar Winds becomes less of an album and more of an hour long meditation–cosmic not because of shimmering synth pads or floating arpeggiation (there are none) but because of its direct sonic verticality. This is the real deal.

Incredibly, Hearing Solar winds is David Hykes’s first album. He went on to release five more albums with the unbelievably precise Harmonic Choir, and five more without them. (Side note: “Rainbow Voice” was featured in the soundtrack for Dead Poets Society.) He’s worked extensively with sound healing and spirituality, developing a comprehensive approach to “contemplative music” called harmonic chant, about which there’s a nice interview with him here. I would highly recommend a rainy day listen of Hearing Solar Winds on good speakers, without doing much of anything else.

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