This Fascinating Weather is a concert-length solo piece for bowed bass, organ pedal, wordless voice, and electronics, premiered June 2023 in Trondheim, Norway.
To experiment with sensory perception, the performance started in blackout lighting conditions and grew slowly and imperceptibly toward blinding light. My set-up was placed diagonally on the floor amongst the audience. Ambient sound was spatialized in the room, while instrumental sound was routed through six speakers of tapering sizes on either side of the bass. These elements of staging, lighting, and spatialization were designed to subvert specular hierarchies of sight in performance, instead emphasizing the audience's 3-dimensional relationship to sound and space.
To produce the piece, I programmed the MIDI organ pedal with samples from a 16th-century Brescian pipe organ, then added more layers of custom-designed sound. Drawing from my audio library, I processed field recordings from both the Trondheim area and my place of origin, upstate New York. By combining associations from both places I tried to create a new sense of place, reanimating an ancient instrument as larger-than-life and exploring its timbral connection to bowed bass.
To compose the piece, I created a succession of scenes and transitions, moving between music and ambience, song and texture, improvisation and set composition. In addition to blending bass and organ pipes, the mechanical sounds of the organ (tracker noises, sound of the blower) were especially interesting to work with in combination with the non-pitched sound palate of bowed bass. The project sought to bridge a personal gap between sound design and live performance, building a sonic world and then playing, improvising, and composing with and within it.
Though most vocals were wordless, the final sequence featured a new song called This Fascinating Weather. The lyrics take weather as a metaphor for one's internal state, going head-to-head with inner turbulence through calm and steady observation: "registering down and in" to be present for "the minutes of the meeting with yourself." The song, and the whole project, was ultimately a tribute to Trondheim, its extreme climate and seasonal shifts in lighting, and a nod to a Norwegian pragmaticism toward chaos as something to spark interest, fascination – "there is no bad weather, only bad clothing."
This Fascinating Weather © Jordan Sand 2023
Skimping on food and water
Every hour on the hour register down and in and sleepin negative
Minutes of the meeting with yourself
Skipping on sons and daughters
When the weekend's got you down I'll slip you a special drug and
Hope it does you good
But don't trace it to me
You don't know what you have you
Don't know what you have you don't
Know what you have until you're craving it so bad
Tying two tongues together
When the weather's got you down I'll teach you a special knot and
Then we'll build a fire
And we'll burn it all night
So what if we met once, and?
What if we met twice?
This fascinating weather!
Production Credits
Sound – Terje Hallan
Lighting – Martin Myrvold
Venue Producer – Arild Schei
Preproduction – Ariel Schlichter
Administration – Hanne Formo
Workspace – Verkstedhallen
Custom platform – Peter Roze
Loan of organ pedals – John Howard
Bridge pickup – Eric Aceto
Fingerboard pickup – Kent McLagan
Inspiration – Bram de Man
Handywoman – Antonia Villafranca
Premiered June 4th, 2023 at Dokkhuset Scene
With support from NTNU and Trondheim Kommune