Rhian Sheehan vs Hammock

Rhian Sheehan is a wonderful ambient composer from New Zealand.  His album, Standing in Silence was one of our favorites on Echoes a couple of years ago with his mixing of found sound and synthesizer cycles.   He’s just collaborated with one of our favorite ambient guitar bands, Hammock, from Nashville.

The original song is from his album, Seven Tales of the North Wind.

~© 2012 John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Become a member of the Echoes CD of the Month Club.

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news.

Echo Location: Rhian Sheehan’s New Zealand Soundscapes

New Zealand composer Rhian Sheehan uses synthesizers and music boxes.

You can hear an audio version of this blog, with Rhian Sheehan’s music, here.

In the attic studio of his New Zealand home, just around the corner from where Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson makes his films,  Rhian Sheehan spins out electronic fantasies.  He’s got a room full of electronic gear, but on his new album, Standing in Silence, he raided his daughter’s toy chest and came out with a music box. It originally played “What a Wonderful World,” but after Rhian finished sampling it, it sounded quite different.

Rhian Sheehan: I took it out of context and tuned it to my own melody, Popped it through a sampler. I had this idea of What would it be like if you were inside of the music box and you could hear the cranks and the sounds, what would it sound like? That was the idea of that track which is track 3 on that album.

In a post-modern twist, Rhian took the digital melody he made from the music box and had that made back into a physical music box which he gave away with his CD. As he plays it in his studio, you can hear the melody of “Standing In Silence 3.”

Rhian Sheehan: We actually put that melody into a real music box so it was like deconstructing and reconstructing.

Although these instrument give Rhian Sheehan’s Standing in Silence a sense of innocence, there is also an undertow of foreboding.  Upon returning to the bucolic calm of New Zealand after an extended trips to places like Tokyo and India, he felt a certain disconnect.  You can see that in the photographs that accompany the CD: desolate urban locations in Tokyo and other places, but the music contains field recordings he made that are full of life and people.

Rhian Sheehan: I was fascinated with that idea. There are photos of shopping malls for example but there are no people, there’s nobody there. I guess that was the idea, in the music you can hear crowds and hear people but you never see people.

Rhian Sheehan’s new album is called Standing in Silence on Loop Records. I’ll have a more extended interview with Rhian on next Tuesdays Echoes.  This has been an Echo Location.

Here’s a video from Standing in Silence.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Architects of Stillness: Steve Roach, John Luther Adams & Rhian Sheehan

I’ve been listening to some beautifully serene music lately.  Not beautiful in the pretty sense, but in the sweep of the music, and not serene in the New Age relaxing sense, but in the almost aggressive focus and attention to detail.

It started recently with Steve Roach‘s Dynamic Stillness.  The title itself speaks to that aspect of intense quietude I’m trying to articulate.  The album harkens back to his classic Structures from Silence, a long-form composition of long-form tones, undulating out across a desert plain, but with tension that only comes from music that flies, but still retains the knowledge that you can fall. It’s scary up there.

While Listening to the Roach, I was preparing for an interview with John Luther Adams and thinking how much of his music calls up the same spirit.  The southwestern desert landscapes that have suffused Roach’s music for the last 20 years aren’t that different from the expansive Alaskan landscapes that inspire Adams.  Both are austere, extreme, muted in color shadings and awe-inspiring in their mix of fragility and toughness.  The only difference is about 100 degrees of temperature.    But both artists are tapping a landscape of solitude and small but detailed wonders.   Adams’ compositions like “Veils” and “In the White Silence” call up more than pristine fields of snow, walls of ice and stark shadows, but the solitude and inner calm they embody, an inner calm that, like Roach, is just on the edge of shattering.  Adams’  24/7 light and sound installation, The Place Where You Go To Listen, may be the true epic of ambient music.  And if it wasn’t in Fairbanks, Alaska, more people would know about it.  Adams writes about this work, based on realtime seismic, magnetic, weather and cosmological changes, in a wonderful book, also called The Place Where You Go To Listen.  It’s not just a description of the process, but a meditation on our relationship to the environment and its manifestation in music.

Rhian Sheehan is a composer from New Zealand who gets to the same place on his CD, Standing in Silence.   It’s an album born from isolation and innocence. He rummages through his daughters toy box, emerging with xylophones and music boxes that he electronically deconstructs and weaves into arrangements for electronics and ambient guitar that make the music itself sound like a lost artifact plucked from the dust and silence of another culture.   Standing in Silence is a retreat from the more pop and beat oriented materiel of his earlier work into a place of solitude and repose.  Although the landscapes of New Zealand are lush and dramatic, there’s a darker, brooding side to Sheehan’s innocence that looms around each corner of this major work.

Steve Roach, John Luther Adams and Rhian Sheehan are architects of stillness.

I had great interviews with John Luther Adams and Rhian Sheehan this week. Look for them in June on Echoes.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))