NEWSLETTER EXCLUSIVE: New Track From "Words and Silences"
This is a time of transition. Over the past few months, I completed several long-standing projects and look forward to sharing new music and ideas with you. Below, there is new funding, a new installation, and an exciting movement toward a new independent record label, Winesap Records, named after my favorite apples in my grandfather's orchard.
To celebrate, I am sharing an exclusive new track from Words and Silences with subscribers, called "Sound of An Unperplexed Wren," where Thomas Merton records the birds outside his hermitage and discusses Samuel Beckett, Paul Klee, and the "flatness" of their work:
"And that in this getting back to a concrete elemental awareness of things, without anything that we have added to them, without any comment of our own, seeing them in their bareness, their way of merging into each other, their flatness. Taking away the perspective that we have put into everything. Seeing them again as flat. Allowing them to make their own different perspective of something underneath which we have not presupposed, which we have not put there."
Best wishes, Brian
NEWSLETTER EXCLUSIVE: SOUND OF AN UNPERPLEXED WREN FROM WORDS AND SILENCES
2021 MAP FUND GRANTEE
I'm so excited to share that my project Words and Silences has been awarded a 2021 MAP Fund Grant. Their support is a game changer, so that the project can be completed and performed. Their support also allows me to think and work deeply with the material, which is invaluable. To learn more about the MAP Fund and the amazing artist projects for 2021, click below.
SOUND INSTALLATION AT THE GUND GALLERY
To complete my year as an artist-in-residence with the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, I compiled and collaged recordings I made throughout the year as a continuous sound installation. Called Where the Forest Meets the Field, it is now up and running at the Gund Gallery through August, and it offers a sonic representation of the rural landscapes of Gambier and the Brown Family Environmental Center. If you'd like to hear an excerpt accompanied by a short essay, click below. Or, if you are in the area, you can hear it in person at the gallery here.
INTRODUCING: WINESAP RECORDS
Over the past fifteen years, I've worked with many amazing record labels, including Atavistic in Chicago, Dust-to-Digital in Atlanta, and Karl in Berlin. Now, I am adding my own to the mix, called Winesap Records. It is named after the Winesap apples I remember eating as a child from my grandfather's orchard in Junction City, Ohio. Back in 2009, I released Silent City (on Atavistic), and the song "And Under the Winesap Tree" obliquely referred to those trees and the persistent memories of childhood and family.
I've already quietly released three albums on Winesap, and I will soon be adding Words and Silences, too. Plus: a big thanks to Samantha Rehark for her logo design work.
And finally: please note that, even though I am a big fan of (and prefer) Bandcamp's model of supporting artists, these albums can now be found on other streaming services, too, including Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube. Happy listening!
One quick note: if you were looking for last month's interview with myself and Alex Sayf Cummings, called "Listening to the Democratic Forest With Brian Harnetty" in Resonance: the Journal of Sound and Culture, it is now free and available to anyone, and can be downloaded here!