…and not to steal my own thunder, but my piece “Void of Horn” for flute, concertina and organ is available on the excellent new compilation Antihistamine 2025 from Vermont’s Histamine Tapes.
Here was my original pitch for the piece:
In September of 2017 I made a short record of alto saxophone pieces played in an extremely windy oak grove in Boulevard, CA. (Two years later I’d get married in the same grove.) The dual roars of the high wind and occasional cars on the nearby freeway felt like a natural match for the screeching altissimo register I was mostly exploring on the instrument at the time. I called the record Contraction and maybe three people listened to it.
In May of 2025 my friend Ryan Ebaugh asked if I wanted to play at the Witch’s Tower, a small outbuilding in the parking lot of San Diego’s Presidio Park. Ryan’s a fellow noisy, improvising alto saxophonist so I figured I should play a different instrument to vary the bill and picked my old concertina. When Ryan ended up double-booking himself in L.A. that night and had to drop off his own bill I figured in his honor I’d bring my alto and play some excerpts from Contraction, only to discover my reed had split completely in two. Thankfully I still had the concertina to play to the maybe ten people gathered on that windy tower.
In June of 2025 another friend invited me to play flute on the score for a documentary on which he was working. The producers made a lot of promises regarding prestigious film festivals and (perhaps most importantly) payment, then backed out of every one. Mostly I simply wanted the score to be heard and the film to be seen but it looks as if neither of those events are likely.
In July of 2025 I saw the call for submissions to this compilation and thought it the perfect opportunity to combine these forgotten pieces for aerophones and the recordings came together in an unsuspectingly satisfying manner. It may sound silly to critique a piece for a wind-themed compilation for sounding too “airy” but the track needed some low end heft, which ended up coming from the 16′ tibia of my organ’s bass pedals. All wind on this track!
From the label:
Do we see even a hundred-thousandth part of what exists? Consider the wind, the greatest force in nature, which knocks men down, demolishes buildings, uproots trees, raises the sea into mountains of water, erodes cliffs, and dashes great ships against the breakers—the wind that kills, that whistles, that moans, that roars—have you seen it, and can you see it?
Yet it exists.”– from Le Horla, by Guy de Maupassant
We are back for another no synth compilation. This is the final in a series of elemental themed compilations. This years theme is air. I asked participants to record the wind and process it. Stick a contact mic on something in wind storm. or just craft something light and airy. As always the one firm rule was that source sounds need to not be electronically generated. My aim is to try to push us all out of the habit of running to the computer to make our sounds for us. I really want folks to go out into the world and record it. Have a relationship with this ephemeral rock we are on.
These words really inspired folks. I am proud to say there are 35 well articulated examples of the theme.
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