woven by air was originally realized for the Sonic Innovations Exhibition, part of the 2018 Caramoor Summer Music Festival as a sound installation.
Electromagnetic recordings of infrastructure at Caramoor (e.g, boiler room generators, switches in guest rooms, modems) support an extended, floating musical line utilizing recordings of Caramoor Festival Co-Founder Lucie Rosen performing the theremin. Normally hidden sounds intermingle with the past, creating a meditative field of activity.
An hour-long composition is orchestrated across a rotunda on the grounds of Caramoor. Small clicks and switches are played back through small transducers hidden and embedded on the wrought iron frame at the top of the rotunda. Generators and electronic drones are played back through an underwater speaker submerged in a vase from the gardens of the Caramoor. The extended musical line derived from Lucie Rosen’s theremin performance controls the illumination of a lantern at the center of the rotunda.
woven by air was released on Anticausal Systems both as digital download and as unique audio cards, each of which features approximately two minutes of the original composition. Hopefully, these sounds continue to find unpredictable paths.
The title woven by air refers to a poem in Naomi Shihab Nye’s collection Voices in the Air.
Special thanks to Stephan Moore, Ellie Gisler Murphy, Tim Coffey, Nina Curley, and Dan Rader at the Caramoor Festival, to Nestor Prieto for mastering to audio card, and to Olivia Valentine and AJ Zandt for design and printing. Many additional thanks to Ranjit Bhatnagar, who assisted with the coding to control the lightbulb in the sound installation.
