Go to YouTube or any of the streaming services and you’ll find hours upon hours of commercially released wind chime recordings, often purportedly of a therapeutic nature. Nature chimes, Divine chimes, Calm chimes, Dream chimes, Flowing chimes, and so on and so forth. And while we agree that there is somehow an inherently peaceful aspect to the sound of chimes, these types of releases tend to entirely remove the aleatory tension to be found anytime a chime is interacting with its surroundings. Hermetically sealed off, a stray clang filled with gust never to found, they largely represent a man made notion of order imposed on nature.
It was a chance YouTube discovery however that led us to the curious phenomenon of users uploading their own cell phone video recordings of chimes, from which this mix is entirely derived. The video’s lengths could range from anywhere from fifteen seconds to ten minutes or so. Some videos had no more than one or two views, others thousands. We found familiar suburban porches with chimes purchased from Costco, to windswept Texan plains with homemade contraptions made of sheet metal pieces. Bamboo chimes, chimes made of shells, forks, car parts, or sea glass —chimes both exquisitely hand crafted, or roughly assembled DIY style. Despite the fact that these are in no way slick and instantly palatable recordings, each uploader obviously felt compelled to proudly share their own softly tinkling corner of the universe. We subtly quilted together with minimal interference somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty of these videos, through which whose sounds you can now discreetly travel. We think the result is a strange, intimate landscape, in many ways very peaceful indeed, but where a stray blast of wind could be coming around the corner at any moment.
All proceeds from this release will be donated to the American Bird Conservancy, that their songs can continue to join the sound of the chimes before it’s too late.
Edition of 80 real-time dubbed cassettes on chrome tape featuring risograph printed j cards on French paper
Price is $11 PPD within the US
Love All Day follows up last year’s Planetary Peace reissue with Warren Sampson’s little-known ambient masterpiece Traveller. Hailing from Minnesota and inspired by the early work of Brian Eno and Jon Hassell, Sampson infused their compositional modes with a self-effacing and distinctly Upper Midwest approach that is equal parts isolated and expansive. Traveller was recorded in a bedroom closet studio on a four-track TEAC reel-to-reel between the late 1970s through the mid 1980s. Not long after its release in 1987, almost all of the copies of the LP ended up in a landfill.
The music of Traveller was inspired by a Chinese ink painting I saw sometime around 1980. Looking for it online now I find I had the title wrong and it probably wasn’t hanging in the gallery I thought it was. Oh well. How much new art is created by trying to copy something and getting it completely wrong?
In 1980, I had the good fortune to spend a year in London studying the History & Philosophy of Science. I was a terrible student but a very large part of who I am came out of that single year. I saw the second night performance by the original cast of Cats. I heard Segovia and saw Nureyev. I saw a concert in a church with legendary avant guitarist Derek Bailey roaming the sanctuary while King Crimson percussionist Jamie Muir dragged saucepan lids across the floor creating moaning pitches. I watched a soprano sax player improvise for half an hour while wrapped in tin foil.
Whenever I went to the National Theatre I got off at Embankment Station and walked across what was then a dark, dingy and isolated Hungerford railroad bridge. There was usually a sax or trumpet player busking on one end. Imagine that sound ringing over the Thames with the night lights of London shimmering on the water. Wiki tells me that the bridge became more dangerous over the years and was the scene of a murder in 1999. Indeed, when I took my wife there in 2015 it was rebuilt as an photoready international tourist destination. I was disappointed but we crossed it and lived. I’m middle aged. Safety over atmosphere.
All art galleries in London are free. The bus ride from my room to the college was essentially all the way across town from southwest to northeast. The number 14 bus route from South Kensington to Warren Street gave me plenty of places to jump off. The beauty of free entry is that you can duck in to see just a few things. Art frequently overloads my brain so small doses are perfect. One day – somewhere – I saw a Chinese ink painting I thought was called “Travellers on a Mountain Road”. Chinese ink painting in particular is something I have to restrict to those small doses.
It absolutely, completely overwhelms me.
I mean holy shit. The power and depth and atmosphere of simple black ink – the stuff they sign checks with – applied to take the maximum effect of the swirling, cloudy texture of silk. Those Chinese painters invented “negative space.” With a bit of ink here, the silk becomes clouds. Another bit of ink over there and the silk is a waterfall. I stand in front of those paintings and I hyperventilate. My heart palpitates. My brain fries.
I will always be sure I saw “Travellers on a Mountain Road” in the Victoria & Albert Museum but an online search doesn’t show it in their collection. I did find “Travelers Among Mountains and Streams” by Fan Kuan. That painting is apparently in the National Palace Museum in Taipei which was never at any time on the number 14 London bus route. Maybe it was on display in 1980 as part of a travelling exhibition. That would be fitting: A traveling painting of travelers.
So that mystery painting is at the root of many things. In college I was obsessed with country blues guitar and usually opened my coffee house set with “Big Road Blues” by Tommy Johnson. I started to think about music existing in either Big Rooms or out on the Big Road. Jazz and Classical music to me were enclosed in Big Rooms: packed to the ceiling, rich and engaging but essentially limited by finite walls.
Big Road Music could take me anywhere. Very particularly, Big Road Music allowed a Midwestern American Caucasian to be inspired by country Blues and Chinese paintings that had no connection at all to my experience. I have always worried about stealing somebody else’s stuff. I love blues but haven’t lived it. I love Irish music but wasn’t raised with it. I love Chinese ink painting but … it literally comes from the other side of the world I know.
Confining and defining music to Rooms and Roads sounds like something an obnoxious guy in his early 20’s would do right? Can you forgive me? I paid for my arrogance by worrying myself sick I was stealing stuff. I called that battle over and done with just a little while ago.
Brian Eno and Jon Hassell are the other two pieces to the creation of this album. I think Eno’s “Ambient 4: On Land” is as important to the history of recorded music as Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue.” “On Land” does precisely the same thing to me as Chinese ink painting. It radiates atmosphere, depth, memory, nostalgia, mystery, a little fear and uncertainty. Palpitations.
Jon Hassell created what he called Fourth World music; music that wasn’t limited to the old world of Western Classical or the Third World. It sounded like Big Road Music to me! But it is tough listening for most. I played one of Eno and Hassel’s albums at a party and a guy asked “Is this Music from Turkish Prisons?” But our ears are more tolerant that we give them credit for. Those gnarly textures have become common in video games and even in mainstream advertising. I saw an anti-freeze ad on TV I swear ripped off a track from Eno!
In college, I bought a four track Teac reel to reel with Simul-Sync and stuck it in a clothes closet to do the best isolated multi-track I could manage. Wherever that machine was or whatever recording rig I was using at the time became Big Road Studios. The compositions on Traveller stretch from the late ‘70s for Drifts (which was recorded for the soundtrack of a black & white 8mm film my friend Sue was working on) to 1987 when the album was made.
I don’t remember when I recorded “Embankment” but now you know what it is about. When I hear it, I remember getting off at Embankment station and walking across that creepy bridge with the sound of a horn floating above the delicate wash of the Thames and the night lights of London all around. An illuminated river of music.
Tunes come out whenever I pick up a guitar or sit at a keyboard. They aren’t all the kind of tunes I am seeking. The ones that stick are like familiar faces in a crowd; the feeling you get by spotting the face of a friend in a crowded station. I used to worry about capturing all of them before they got away. And then I relaxed and realized I live next to a river of music. Every day I ask myself, “What does the river look like today?
Here’s a very rare & exceedingly charming cassette recorded by couple Will & Cath (Kalima) Sawyer in 1980. Comprised of both lovely songs, instrumental synth passages, and a palpable DIY aesthetic, a copy of this album was discovered by sound recordist/record collector Brett Becker in New Mexico last year, which led us to tracking down the Sawyer’s in Hawaii. They’ve very graciously allowed us to post the entirety of their album here, and this is what they had to say about its creation in a recent email….
“We recorded it ourselves in London, fall 1980, on a TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck, in our living room. We had arrived in London with all of our equipment, intent on making this recording before the arrival of our first child in Mar, ’81. Through grace or luck, we found a small cottage near Hampstead Heath (right in the heart of London) that was quiet enough in the evenings to do the work.
Because we were (are) into harmonic tuning, rather than equal temperament, we had searched out an instrument that we could tune ourselves; there was an engineer, Serge Tcherepnin, in San Francisco who had developed a kit for an analog synthesizer which fit our specs. We spent a few months prior to leaving for London laboriously building it, soldering it together and learning how to play it. It required patch cords that manually routed the signals in various configurations, connecting oscillators, filters, etc. Now of course, this is all done digitally . . .
We used a TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck, Shure mics and maybe some other stuff, like reverb, all of which we brought over with us. The funny part is that as we left S.F., our flight was delayed for several hours while they de-planed everyone in a remote area on the tarmac and looked through everyone’s luggage. They said there had been a bomb scare, and we figured out quite a bit later that it was our synthesizer that had likely triggered the alert. That was SO out of everyone’s context at that time, as this before “terrorists” had been invented!
…
Once our daughter arrived, we more or less dropped it all; it is actually a minor miracle that you happened across one of the very rare cassettes that we got around to distributing!”
Now based in Ha’iku, Hawaii on the island of Maui, they continue to create music to this day on a solar powered studio they built themselves. You can find more of their creations recorded over the last 40 years on their soundcloud page located here…https://soundcloud.com/synthesis555/sets/s-y-n-t-h-e-s-i-s
