Whip Law

An audio investigation of Reno’s whip culture.

How a small sonic boom came to represent homelessness in Reno, and how the city responded to unhoused people taking up sonic real-estate.

Utility, aesthetic language, 911 tape and the search for Reno’s master whip maker.

 

“The popularity of possessing a whip and cracking has grown significantly over the last few years…Calls for service regarding the whips have nearly doubled over the last year.” - Lt. Ryan Connelly, Reno Police Department speaking to city council.

“…we gotta travel at night. We don’t want all of our stuff out here. So we travel the bike trail. And there’s skunks and raccoons and even snakes, gosh you name it. Well we had a bear down here, know what I’m saying? So that crack is very useful to make em go away for sure.” - Monica Plumber

“The tip of the whip obviously breaks the sound barrier, if used correctly, the integrity of the whip is compromised, due to not being professionally constructed and the materials that they are made out of…..The vast majority of the whips that we have seen in and around town are homemade, and they use a variety of materials such as rope, string chains, leather to name a few.” - Lt. Ryan Connelly, Reno Police Department

“And you know, one has a different sound than the other. We can tell who’s who just from the crack from down the river. It’s amazing... You can really tell where your family is at…” - Monica Plumber

“I ask that you pass the proposed ordinance regarding whips. I frequently hear the whips cracking. I hear them from my home. I hear them when I'm out and about. They make a very scary noise. They basically sound like a gunshots…” Eric Lerude, Public Comment

“…I enjoy the public spaces and the last couple of years, it gets worse and worse. Three a.m. in the morning, it's simulated gunfire. And it's a means of intimidation...” Anthony Townsend, Public Comment

“…I think that the whip ban is discriminatory. … I mean, if there's if there's an issue of them attacking people with the whips, that should be a an assault thing. And there's already laws in place for that… Why are we making criminals out of people over something that helps them?” Gabe Stransky, Public Comment

“The unsheltered population is over-policed, lacks trust in law enforcement, and this ordinance threatens any efforts to build that trust…” - Holly Wellborn (ACLU of Nevada), Public Comment

“I don't believe that artistic expression should interfere with people's quiet enjoyment of their property.” - Councilmember Naomi Duerr

“…I think it's intimidating. I think it's absolutely dangerous….This is in no way an art form, I'm sorry…” Reno Mayor Hillary Scheive

“I've heard from the people for this ordinance and people with concerns for this ordinance that they understand the whip crackers to be people who are homeless. Is that like a universal given as we move forward with this?” Councilmember Jenny Brekhus

“…I’m alone. I don’t have boyfriend or any of that… I don’t carry a knife…So it’s nice to know that my family is out here with me. And if I crack my whip, somebody will crack theirs.” - Monica Plumber

Monica Plumber:  This is rough. This is really rough. And it’s really scary sometimes.
The Wind: What do you mean by "this"?
Monica Plumber: Being out here. Homeless.

“Mine’s just to get attention from like everybody around, they know I'm in the area when I crack my whip.” - Hatchet 

The Wind: Do you think it's about power or control?
Hatchet: It's more like releasing… Because when I get angry, when I get sad or something, I just pick up a whip, it helps me release it... Honestly, I use to get physical. With people and stuff when I get angry, but not anymore. Once I started doing the whip, cracking the whip, It just released all that.”
The Wind: Do you have a favorite in town?
Hatchet: My favorite has to be Fernando. He braids the best.

“With a lot of uses with the whip, they're using just the sound of it. (Historically) there would be different patterns or different sequences usually referred to as a flash. There would be the Queensland Flash or the Sydney Flash, and it would be basically a unique sequence of cracks or unique rhythm that would be recognizable. So you would hear that and be like, Oh, that's you know, this delivery company or, you know, what have you that's coming down the road. …” - Matt Franta, Los Angeles Whip Artists

“…I’ve been on the streets since I've been to Reno, so I've been in Reno for 14 years…I got into it because I was homeless…. At first I didn't like it. It was like, “These are stupid you guys are you're wasting your time.” But then I was like, man, “if you guys can make it, I bet I can make a better one.” Competition…I have ADHD. So my hands are always moving, and this right here, constantly, you're moving up and down.” - Nando, Downtown Reno Whip Maker

“Hello this is Lisa, a local resident of Reno, and I'm very concerned about the current atmosphere and the knee jerk reactions going on with these horse whips. It's called a crop. They are used for the hind quarter of the horse to move the horse out of tough situations such as the river, any kind of running water… So to just suddenly ban them. It's it's silly. Being a horse rider and knowing many ranchers here in town, we're just appalled. I can't believe this. Please reconsider the decision because valuable tools and can often be used to help move the horse in a dangerous situation… I cannot stress to you guys the value and the importance of retaining the horse crop for use in public service. Thank you.“ - Lisa, Public Comment

“…If you've got a horse and you're down south, that's totally fine and fair and you're not going to be penalized for using that whip. So again, it really gets to… the problem is the downtown. The problem is we have, you know, whips cracking downtown, sounds like gunshots. People report gunshots and that activity has got to stop and we don't expect to see that outside of the downtown corridor area.” Jonathan Shipman, Assistant City Attorney

“…A lot of us, we live downtown. I mean, homeless, you know, I mean, like, we live downtown and it is what it is. We don't really we don't have the means to go all the way up to the country and all that.” - Nando

“…like any sort of kind of like spiritual practice or, you know, trying to to cultivate mindfulness or meditation as as a movement artist, I prefer moving meditation, right? Something that I can connect body and mind that way rather than sitting still… it's something that you can stick with your entire life. There's always more to learn.” - Matt Franta, Los Angeles Whip Artists

Whip. At my request, Nando braided a twig of aspen from Throat Forest into the handle. (Pictured on my desk)

“Each time I make a whip, I lose a piece of my soul. Not for the bad… Like when I do go one day, if my whips are still around, if they're not in the garbage, I'm still going to be here… this one right here, when you take this one, when I'm done with it, my spirit is in this. A piece of my soul goes, know what I mean? And … I grow a new soul. All the time I've had on the streets and all that, just everything I've been through… all the bad. It gets put into these whips, you know? I become a new me each time.” - Nando

Thank you to Emily Pratt Mike Corbitt and Anjeanette Damon for support and advice on this episode. Additional thanks to Nico Colombant & Natalie Handler. About a month after our interview, Nando was evicted from his motel room, along with everybody who lived in the building. He and his wife found another place. After the whip ban passed, I heard from a few people that their whips had been confiscated. Three people I spoke to said that they were simply making replacements, and whipping more frequently in the middle of the night to avoid detection.

Episode scored by Howls Road

+ Mountains by Yclept Insan

Math behind Whip Cracking

Our Town Reno blurb on Paul Espinoza

Matt Franta • Website • LA Whip Artists

Transcript of this story

Tags, Topics and Mentions: Whips, Reno whips, Reno whip man, Reno, Downtown Reno, Audio Journalism, Radio Journalism, bullwhip, bullwhips, reno whip law, reno whip ordinance, reno's whip problem, whips in Reno, whip culture, 911 audio, sonic booms, public comment, community journalism, Reno City Council, Naomi Duerr, Jenny Brekhus, Hillary Schieve, Devon Reese, Oscar Delgado, Bonnie Weber, Neoma Jardon, City Attorney Karl Hall, Assistant City Attorney Jonathan Shipman, Ryan Connelly, Reno Police Department, Reno Police, Reno 911, whip braiding, whip making, how to make a whip, paracord, how to make a nylon whip, whip sound, houselessness, homelessness in Reno, unsheltered population in Reno, point-in-time count Reno, Truckee River, Brick Park Reno, Methodist Church Reno, Reno City Plaza, Wells Overpass, Brodhead park, Wingfield Park, Arlington Tower, Park Tower, Reno riverwalk, Los Angeles Whip Artists, Howls Road, The Wind, The Wind Podcast, thewind.org

The Cobra, The Fuse, and The Woman at the End of the World (with Kiko Dinucci)

Listening to 3 pieces from Brazilian guitarist Kiko Dinucci. Samba, repetition, resistance and change.

Plus, a primer on regime change and presidential politics in Brazil.

Rastilho

Kiko Dinucci: “It's been about 10 years since I've realized that in my music, in all my works and projects, such as Metá Metá, I have been working with something beautiful and something ugly; something violent and something lyrical. And I think Brazil is like that. It is a tropical country with wonderful nature, but it has its past and history marked by death, exploitation, and so on and so on… So we live with many amazing things, especially when we think about our culture and nature; but there's a lot of bad stuff too. Thus, we still have a lot of marks from our colonial period, from slavery, from military dictatorship… so I got used to writing songs in this way: bringing together beautiful and ugly things; lyrical and violent things. I like that mix and I like artists who play with it.”

A Mulher do Fim do Mundo

Guilherme Kastrup, drummer and producer of A Mulher do Fim do Mundo: “Elza has this kind of Fire… She used to say, “my name is now.” “My name is now! My name is now!” All the time. It’s true. It’s true in her heart.”

Elza Soares. A Mulher do Fim Do Mundo features a group of contemporary braziliian musicians from noise, punk and hardcore including Guilherme Kastrup, Kiko Dinucci, Romulo Fróes, Rodrigo Campos, Marcelo Cabral, Thiago França, Bixiga 70

Kiko Dinucci, guitarist and vocalist on A Mulher do Fim do Mundo: ”Everything gets a little naive when compared to samba; because samba has beautiful things, but also has a violent side -- which could be in the lyrics or on drums… When you go to a samba school, for instance, and listen to the drums, that's hardcore!

So I guess these different things connect with each other. Any transgressive thing connects itself with other transgressive things. When one thinks about Elza Soares career, one could see that it is marked by transgression. Yet when she was recording samba albums, there was always something new; a new way of playing samba, a new way of singing it. Thus, when she met us - hardcore punk musicians, there was no generaitional clash. She was the one who asked to turn up the guitars.”

Guilherme Kastrup: “This CD don’t talk about politics directly. There is nothing on this CD that is talking about democracy or parties... We are talking about human beings. We are talking about living with the difference. Talking about the gay, the transgender the women not to be hit. That’s that. But the situation now…at this point, talking about not hitting a woman represents a very strong political position. And to live with the difference you know?” (2016)

Metá Metá ★ CASA DE FRANCISCA

— filmed & edited by vincent moon, sound recording by césar martini, mixed by guilherme destro —

Kiko Dinucci: “The Brazilian musician, in our popular music, established a way to compose that is with harmonic progressions to elaborate things very carefully harmonically, perhaps due to jazz influence during the Bossa Nova period. (but) I've always like guitar riffs and groovy basses in James Brown, Michael Jackson, Prince.. I like when the bass repeat itself and drive the song.

… it's like this: when it repeats, it does not come back the same. No loop is the same. Everything changes around us; different people could come and go; the air changes; the country changes; the world rotates along with the loop… the world is a loop, right? and so things are not the same.” “e as coisas não são iguais…”

Kiko Dinucci responding to Gus Venturelli: Acho que todas as casas de show, pequenas e grandes… eu tenho um ligação muito forte com a casa de francisca, que era um lugar muito pequeno, cabiam 40 pessoas, e depois foi pra um lugar maior no centro de sp, e eles tao passando por muita dificuldades. a associação cecilia, onde eu toco bastante tambem; a audio rebel no RJ tá com dificuldades; lugares maiores tambem, como o circo voador no rio. Eu acho que vai ser muito dificil a volta.. muitos desses lugares não vão mais existir quando todo mundo estiver vacinado.. eu não sei como muitos ainda não fecharam e estão conseguindo se manter. uns dias atrás teve uma campanha pra salvar o ó do borogodó, lugar onde eu já toquei diversas vezes, porque eles tavam quase fechando. Eu acho que quando sairmos da pandemia e os shows voltarem, vai ser tipo um cenário de guerra, de encontrar os destroços desses lugares.. mas ao mesmo tempo as pessoas que gerenciam esses lugares estão prontos pra voltar, mesmo que seja do nada.. O renato da cecilia, Pedro, da audio rebel; o rubens da casa de francisca.. eles tem muita gana, muita vontade de fazer as coisas acontecerem.. mesmo que essas casas venham a fechar, eu acredito que eles começariam algo do zero. E acredito que todo mundo vai recomeçar suas vidas do zero.. sobre tocar, aqui no brasil a perspectiva é ruim.. a vacinação tá muito lenta. eu tenho uma turne do Rastilho marcada na europa, em novembro.. mais ou menos 30 shows. eu percebo que lá as coisas tão voltando ao normal, mas aqui não temos muita perspectiva. o mais importante nesse momento, no brasil, é nos mantermos vivos, porque tem muita gente morrendo, e quando você está doente num hospital nada é mais importante que a saúde e a vida.. então a gente esquece um pouco da arte e do trabalho.. a gente só pensa na família e na saúde. então estamos num momento crítico e quando for pra reconstruir as coisas, a gente vai reconstruir.

Links:

Metá Metá - MetaL MetaL

Elza Soares - A Mulher do Fim do Mundo

Kiko Dinucci - Rastilho

Nelson Cavaquinho

Elza Soares - Mas Que Nada

Metá Metá - Obatalá (closing song)

Guilherme Kastrup

Le Dégoût (Gus Venturelli)

MNTH (Luciano Valério)

Tags, Topics and Mentions: Kiko Dinucci, Metá Metá, Elza Soares, A Mulher do Fim do Mundo, Rastilho, Nelson Cavaquinho, Mas Que Nada, Guilherme Kastrup, Mais Um Discos, Brazil, Brazilian politics, Brazilian presidential election, Casa de Francisca, Samba, repetition, Carta de Samba, punk, brazilian hardcore, noise music, experimental music, samba punk, dirty samba

Hell Walk

Imagining the future of box stores, through the 86 song EP “The Staples in Roseville, CA” by People with Bodies.

A conversation with Emily Pratt in the Wendys in Fernley, NV.

Map: Zoom out to locate a chain store near you!

Tags, Topics and Mentions: Hell Walk, People with Bodies, The Staples in Roseville, CA. The Wendy's in Fernely, NV, The future of big box stores, big box stores, the future of box stores, wendys, the generator, the generator nevada, reno, Kietzke, Music journalism, existential dread, depression coping techniques, captain beefheart, trout mask replica, Genesis P-Orridge, logic 7, garageband, midi saxaphone

Why to Build an Aeolian Harp

An interview with composer John Luther Adams.

John Luther Adams • Website

“Classical music is a profound expression of the height of a society or a culture that is gone. So everything I do from here on, I want to somehow be part of the society that I imagine will follow this one.”

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Fil Corbitt: How is everything going, how are you doing?

John Luther Adams: Doing well, thanks. How about yourself?

Fil Corbitt: I'm doing good, too. It's a really beautiful day. Right now it's November, you know, in the Sierras. So all the all the leaves are turned and it's really nice out right now.

John Luther Adams: What are your, what are your temperatures like?

Fil Corbitt: You know, right now it's about 40 degrees, I think a high of like 46 today or something. And then, you know, we're getting down into the 20s at night, sometimes into the teens. But yeah, it's been pretty comfortable.

John Luther Adams: What's your what's your elevation, Fil?

Fil Corbitt: I'm at 7500 ft.

John Luther Adams: Yeah, that makes sense. We are much farther south and we're at about 6000. And it's, you know, last year at this time, we had snow. Right now I'm I'm sitting outside in the sunshine, you know, maybe it's got to be in the low 70s.

Fil Corbitt: Oh, wow. So pretty warm. Yeah.

John Luther Adams: Yeah, yeah. So tell me about what you're doing.

Fil Corbitt: Basically, I make this show called The Wind and it's a podcast and radio show. And I basically I just built a desk out in the woods a couple of miles from my house and come out here and do interviews and just try to kind of research, sound in new ways and try to think of music and music journalism kind of as an experience of listening deeper. And yeah, just kind of trying to get out of the studio, I guess.

John Luther Adams: Well, when Molly sent me your message. I thought.. Your inquiry, your invitation, I thought, Well, this was just offbeat enough to to be intriguing. I'm saying no to a lot of interviews these days, but there is just something about what you're doing that that appealed to me that caught my imagination. So here we are.

Fil Corbitt: Cool. That's really cool to hear. As far as this episode goes, it is kind of a dive into the Aeolian harp, and I was kind of thinking of it as a how and why to- build a harp. And I've been trying to to build them. I'm still definitely a novice, but yeah, I'm just trying to kind of, you know, tell other people kind of what they are, what they do and kind of figure out why I've been compelled to try to build these things. And you seemed like the perfect person to ask.

John Luther Adams: Well, I understand why you're compelled they're magical.

Fil Corbitt: I mean, why? What do you think the what is so magical about ‘em?

John Luther Adams: Well, it's it's an instrument that allows us to pull music directly out of the air. The music comes down out of the sky and across the strings of the instrument and into our ears and out through our bodies and into the Earth.  I've never built an Aeolian harp, but much of my life's work has been shaped by my experiences listening to Aeolian harps and in particular one small harp that I carried all over the tundra, the forests, the mountains, the glaciers of Alaska, listening to the wind for years. And part of the magic, I think Fil, is that it opens up the harmonic series, which is all around us all the time, you might say it's the breath of the world, but we rarely hear the harmonic series alone. It's usually deeply embedded in the breath of the world,  in the sounds all around us, most of which are noise. And when I say noise, you know, I'm speaking of noise not in the vernacular sense of unwanted sound, but I'm talking about complex aperiodic sound which, as John Cage observed many, many years ago, is most of what we hear around us all the time. So with these magical harps, we can filter the breath of the world, the wind and and hear the harmonic series revealed in all its miraculous glory. I think of it as almost like, you know, you put a harp on your head and stand into the wind and the the the pink noise you might say the white light of the world crosses the strings, and it's almost like a prism. And then the wind goes across the strings and it breaks into all these beautiful harmonic colors. This aural prism of sound.

Fil Corbitt: It's really interesting that you that you used the word filter because I think that's kind of what I've been trying to figure out is: what are these things? Are they translators? Are they, you know, is it something that is creating its own sonic world? And it seems like it's not... It's so dependent on the wind and the velocity of the wind that it is translating something and I like the idea of a filter that it's kind of filtering the sound that is passing through it into a type of sound that we can, you know, kind of understand better.

John Luther Adams: Well, I use that word filter almost as an acoustitian would use it, right? I mean, if you take wind as a kind of colored noise, you know, the hypothetical version of that the synthetic version of noise is... The most clinical version of of synthetic noises is, of course, white noise, in which theoretically, all the frequencies that we can hear are present in equal energy in a random fashion. So essentially, it's all the sounds that we can hear in the air all at once. And as you know, the wind obviously is already filtered by by trees and by rocks and by grasses and by water and by bird feathers and whatever else is passing through. By your hair, by your ears. But it is a kind of beautiful filter. Another way  through which we can hear the inner life of the wind. Another way of describing it, I guess it would be an Aeolian Harp as transducer. Like a microphone or a loudspeaker is, I guess, a loudspeaker... I guess transducers can go either way. They can send or receive signals. But my relationship to the Aeolian harp has been as a way to extend the reach of my ears. To allow me to hear things that I couldn't otherwise hear, at least not so clearly. And so it's a receiving transducer. And then so am I. I become a receiver. And that music passes from the wind through the harp into my body, my ears, my imagination. And then eventually it comes back out as as The Wind in High Places or as Sila: The Breath of the World or so many other pieces of my music over the over the last four decades.

Fil Corbitt:  I want to come back to a couple of those -- before I get carried away, I would like to ask you specifically about your Aeolian sound world.

John Luther Adams: It's funny because I'm working on two pieces right now, mixing two recordings, one of a piece that's now several years old and then another recording I'm working on of brand new pieces. And both of these grow out of my experiences of listening to wind harps, listening to Aeolian harps. The new piece actually goes back to the place it all began, which was standing on the tundra in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where my beloved Cynthia and I had our wedding ceremony in 1989. And making my very first recording of Aeolian Harps. And I remember I would I would put the harp on my head. This is the harp that that I still own. It's maybe two and a half three feet wide, about nine or ten inches tall and, you know, ten or eleven inches wide. It has two string choruses, they're nylon strings. It's a beautiful little instrument that was made by my friend Robert Cunningham, wonderful instrument builder. And, you know, small enough that I could throw it into a backpack and I hike off across the tundra. And it was small enough that I could stand out there, hold the thing on my head, and dance like a weather vane in the wind. So I could, you know, turn from side to side with the wind. They could tilt the harp slightly up or down to to catch as much of the wind as I could. And to add to the magic, Fil, was of course, this music coming out of the sky across the strings of the harp down through my skull and and through my body, right back into the Earth. So I became, in that sense, a kind of resonator for the music of the wind.

John Luther Adams: Anyway, I started making recordings. This would have been late June, early July, in 1989, and we had a stretch of unusually perfect weather there in the in the foothills of Brooks range and the Arctic Coastal Plain. And I had three or four days of just ideal conditions in which there was a light breeze, light and variable breeze from different directions. But never overwhelming, and the harp was just singing so sweetly so I made recordings with all the strings tuned to the same tone, tuned in unison. I can't remember how many strings there are in each of the string courses, but maybe a dozen or so on each side because, as you know it requires a certain critical mass of turbulent air of vortex shedding across the strings for a harp to be able to sing. It has to have enough disturbed air circulating for it to emit tone - to get the strings singing with the harmonic series. Anyway, I made recordings of the unisons and then I got the idea. Well, let me let me to one side to a different pitch, so I knelt down on the tundra and I tuned one side to G the other side to D. And I stood back up, put the harp on my head and a whole new world of harmonic, melodic musical colors opened up to me, and I've been exploring that world ever since.

Fil Corbitt: We'll be back in a few minutes after this excerpt of The Wind in High Places by John Luther Adams.

Fil Corbitt: What really touches me about your music is that it just always sounds like this unexpected dispatch from this world between human and non-human, like it just sounds so elemental and...

John Luther Adams: thank you.

Fil Corbitt: Sure! I mean, just big in ways that you don't hear people sound. And so I guess that's that's what I'm wondering is, do you see yourself as you know, a translator of these elemental forces? Is that your role?

John Luther Adams: That's a fair question. And maybe so. But really, the honest truth, Fil, is that this is what I need. You know, like all of us who live in this fragmented, crumbling, contemporary society. I long in my heart, my mind and my spirit to be in touch with something older, deeper or more mysterious than than than my own troubles and the travails and foibles of human society. This is what I need for myself. And I hope that out of that comes music that is somehow useful and meaningful to other people who are feeling something similar in this crazy world that we humans have created for ourselves. You know what keeps me going now, what am I am? So I'll be 69 before long. What keeps me going is my love for and my faith in the next generations. My generation has failed miserably as custodians of the Earth and custodians of humanity. I hope only to leave something that may be of use to younger people who will have to sort through the rubble that my generation is leaving to them and imagine, and to bring about new ways of living together with one another and with all other forms of life on this beautiful planet, which you know, is the only home that most of us will ever know.

Fil Corbitt: Your music so often deals with time in a really interesting way and deals with ideas of very sprawling time spaces, I guess, is the way I'd put it, is that a conscious decision?

John Luther Adams: Well, most of my music is, I guess, slow. But then there are pieces particularly in my percussion music; The Strange and Sacred Noise would be a piece I'd point you to... Some of that is very, very fast, and at a certain point, the lines kind of blur.

John Luther Adams: I just finished what I swear will be my final orchestral piece, and it's called An Atlas of Deep Time.  I've been I've been reading the rocks. I've been reading a lot of of Earth history and geology and trying to learn to decipher geologic maps, to decipher the hundreds of millions of years of history beneath my feet on this mountain where I live. This new piece is 46 minutes long. So it's a sprawling orchestral piece on a scale similar to Become Ocean or Become Desert. But the tempo marking is 100 million years per minute. Because the piece is 46 minutes long. And of course, the Earth is as far as we can far as we can figure, mas o menos four billion six hundred million years old. This is really fast music, Fil!

Fil Corbitt: Hahaha I really like that. That's cool. And when that comes out, where is it going to be?

John Luther Adams: I will see you on April 30th in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Fil Corbitt: OK, I'll be there.

John Luther Adams: Yeah, I'm excited about it. But you know, I swear this is it. I'm done. I'm done with orchestra music. You know, because Fil, I you know what I said earlier, right? I really want to fall in with the society that I want to live in, which I'll probably never live to inhabit. Classical music is a profound expression of the height of a society or a culture that is gone.

---

John Luther Adams: So everything I do from here on, I want to somehow be part of the society that I imagine will follow this one. Part of the new culture that younger people like you, and kids who are just coming of age now, will create.

Fil Corbitt: That's really exciting -- just the way you said that,  that's something that, makes me want to be a part of it, too, whatever it is.

John Luther Adams: Well, it's clear that you are part of it. And...I think we're all struggling with...at least most of us are struggling these days with being discouraged. I mean, it seems like there are so many things wrong, and the way forward just seems unclear. And yet I need kids, you know, teenagers, 20 somethings who are determined that they're going to make things right, and that gives me the courage to keep doing whatever I can do to help.

Fil Corbitt: What are you listening to lately? I know you said you're working a lot and mixing, but are you listening to anything outside of that?

John Luther Adams: No. You know, the unvarnished truth is that I rarely listen to music because of course, my life's work is to hear something that hasn't been heard before or to imagine that and to try to hear it and bring it into the air so that it can be heard. When I was younger, I was a veracious listener. I would just listen to music all the time and and all kinds of music and, especially music that I thought I didn't like. I'd seek it out. The way you seek out a new flavor, you know something to this, that first makes you will crunch up your nose. Because I love that experience of discovery. But now...I was thinking the other day, I do want to listen to some music again. But what do I want to hear right now? I want to hear, maybe Tuvan throat singing. I want to hear Tibetan monks chanting and banging on drums and gongs and playing those long trumpets. I want to hear a peyote chant with the drumming that just goes on and on and on and on and on and the high keening voice that just goes higher and higher and higher. Yeah, I want to hear music that is somehow more deeply connected to the Earth and to what I call the real world, than most of the music that comes from our culture. And most of all, I just I just want to hear the birds. And I just want to listen to the wind on the mountain. And you used the word elemental, which is the word I use a lot. I have hundreds of hours of field recordings that I made mostly in the 1980s and 90s in Alaska, all over Alaska. And we have recently re-digitized those recordings, and I have them all now on a hard drive. And I don't know where this may lead me, but when I've been listening recently to recorded music, that's what I've been listening to. I've just been listening to glaciers calving into the seas, thunder rolling over mountaintops to candle ice tinkling in a whirlpool on the Yukon River, to the wind across the tundra. You know, it remains to be heard where this may lead me, but my thought is that it may result in something big in a form that I can't imagine yet -- something that I've never done before.

Fil Corbitt: Well, thank you so much for taking the time, it's really been very inspiring to just go listen deeper after talking to you. So thank you.

John Luther Adams: Well, the pleasure is all mine. I thank you for what you're doing and and for your for your energy, for your love. These days, we're all asking ourselves, What can I do? And you're doing something and more power to you for that. Thanks for doing it.

Fil Corbitt: Thank you. Thank you. All right, John, have a good night.

John Luther Adams: Take good care.

Fil Corbitt: You, too. Bye.

John Luther Adams: Bye.

Tags, Topics and Mentions: John Luther Adams, Aeolian Harp, How to build an Aeolian Harp, Alaska, Become Desert, Become Ocean, Become River, The Wind in high places, Arctic dreams, An atlas of deep time, composition, South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, Future of music, future music, wind harp

How to Build an Aeolian Harp

An attempt to pull music from the sky by building a harp of a felled aspen tree.

Official reports from the road // Traveling the west with an Aeolian Harp: listening in dry lake beds, great sand dunes, and the world's largest living organism, Pando Aspen Grove.

An Aeolian Harp is one of the rare musical instruments not played by human hands. It is a harp played entirely by the wind.

Named after Aeolus, the Greek god of winds, the Aeolian Harp can be pretty much any shape, and made of any material. Most of them that I’ve seen are wooden boxes, typically with a hole in the front and any number of nylon strings stretched lengthwise across the hole.

When you set this instrument outside on a windy day, the air rushes over the strings and without any human intervention, it vibrates them like an invisible violin bow.

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