Tuesday, October 13, 2015

THE ROUGH WINDOWS RADIO HOUR: "NUMINA" ... WHAT YOU HEARD ON RADIO FREE FLAGSTAFF, 94.5 FM, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11


Ancient Romans used the word "Numina" to describe the divine spirit of a particular place.

This  program was all music intimately connected to a particular place.

The tracks played were:
1. In A Beautiful Place Out In the Country  by Boards of Canada
2. New Light At Thornborough  by the Xenis Emputae Traveling Band
3. Journeys On The Winds Of Time  by Alan Lamb.
4. Children  by Tony Schwartz
5. Vihuela and Wolf Pack #1  by Jim Nollman
6. Warminster 4  by The Mt. Vernon Arts Lab
7. Camp 2 - World Music On The Radio  by Geir Jenssen
8. Earth's Magnetic Field  by Charles Dodge

Some notes on the pieces: the Alan Lamb piece was a recording of the wind vibrating miles of telegraph wires in Western Australia. A very good article on Alan Lamb's work can be found here.

Norweigian Geir Jenssen is better known in the music world by the name Biosphere. In addition to being a composer of ambient electronic music, Jenssen is an accomplished mountain climber. The piece we heard was recorded at the top of one of the highest mountains in the word, Cho Oyu in Tibet. You can learn more about his work here.

It has been said that "Earth's Magnetic Field" by Charles Dodge was actually composed by the planet itself. Dodge created it by mapping data from the Earth's magnetic field data to a four octave span, or 45 notes. The piece was realized using Digital Audio Converters that Bell Laboratories was developing in the late 1950's. You can read more about it here.

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