Episdoe 44: The Falls – A three hour composition for headphones.

In December 2008 my wife and I took a trip to Niagara Falls. This composition uses some of those recordings as its base. I processed them a lot. The only bit field recording that remains ‘clean’ is a short recording from inside the Niagara Falls Welcome Center. There are three other field recordings in the piece, one a microphone that I dangled down into a jetty on the gulf side of Florida, a short recording from a picnic area just off the beach, also in Florida, and the other sitting near the Horace Mann football field in the Bronx, I was resting after a long bike ride. Besides these brief respites, the piece is tones, grumbles, wa-wa’s, groans, beats and other sounds created through digital signal processing of Niagara Falls. The piece is made at a personal scale, three hours, a duration that is easy to imagine, but hard to hold onto. Ideally, The Falls is to be listened to while at work – doing tasks that you may not want to do or monotonous tasks you like. I would suggest gardening, raking leaves, doing dishes, painting a wall or changing light bulbs.

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