An Album of Electro-Acoustic “Found Objects”

Readers may recall that the last article on this site about a new release on Cold Blue Music of the work of John Luther Adams was filed a little over a year ago on May 21, 2021. That album was devoted entirely to a single composition entitled “Arctic Dreams,” in which he drew upon the resources of four string players, four singers, and three layers of digital delay to evoke what he called the “‘aeolian’ sound world” of the reverberations of wind harps on the tundra. It appears that, after having finished his work on “Arctic Dreams,” Adams decided to take a more direct approach to those “aeolian” sonorities.

from the Barnes & Noble Web page for the album being discussed

The result is a new composition, entitled “Houses of the Wind,” which was completed earlier this year. Adams provided his own account of how this music was created as follows:

In the last two decades of the 20th century, I made field recordings of elemental sounds all over Alaska—fire, ice, thunder, glaciers calving into the sea. Recently, I transferred those aging tapes to more stable media. Listening to the very first segment of a small aeolian harp, recorded in the Arctic in the summer of 1989, I was captivated. The voices of the wind singing through the strings of the harp brought back vividly the clarity of light, the sprawling space, and the sense of possibility I had felt.

Houses of the Wind (2021–22) is composed entirely from that single ten-and-a-half-minute recording, transposed, layered on itself, and sculpted into five new pieces of the same length. The world has changed since then, in ways we couldn’t have imagined. The winds rushing around us now seem darker, more turbulent and threatening. Yet still, if this music is haunted by feelings of loss and longing, I hope it also offers some measure of consolation, even peace.

There is nothing new about using tape music techniques to take one form of sound and transform it into another. This as a compositional practice that dates back at least as far as the Forties when it was developed by Pierre Schaeffer, who called the practice musique concrète (i.e. the transformation of natural, or “concrete” sounds into music). My first serious effort at composition involved taking a tape of sounds created by the frequency modulation synthesis technique developed by John Chowning at Stanford University in the Sixties. Like Schaeffer, I used that tape as a source that I then subjected to transformations of my own design.

What makes “Houses of the Wind” interesting is that Adams took a single source and subjected it to transformation five different times in five different ways. The result is his latest Cold Blue Music album, also entitled Houses of the Wind, consisting of five tracks, all of roughly the same duration and each named after a particular type of wind phenomenon:

1. Catabatic Wind
2. Mountain Wind
3. Tundra Wind
4. Canyon Wind
5. Anabatic Wind

To be honest, I am just beginning to appreciate the qualities that endow each track with its own unique characteristics; but the listening experience is engaging enough that this exercise strikes me as totally worth the time invested in it!

Houses of the Wind is currently scheduled for release this coming Friday, June 17. As seems to be the case more and more often, Amazon.com has not yet acknowledged the existence of this recording. Once again, the day has been saved by Barnes & Noble, which has created a Web page for processing pre-orders. Currently, the album is only available as a “physical” CD; but the album jacket includes Adams’ commentary on how the content was created.