Signal Chain — Season 2 — Episode 4
Signal Chain — Season 2 — Episode 4
Welcome to Season 2 of Signal Chain. This pop-up newsletter is a creative collaboration between generative musician Duncan Geere and photographer Oliver Holms.
We’re taking turns to send new work to each other. Each new piece is inspired by the piece before. We’re building a chain of influence together and you’re along for the ride. New instalments are released on the 1st and 15th of every month, and you can unsubscribe at any time using the link in the footer.
::SC-S2-E04::
Hi Oliver,
I hope you’re doing okay.
Your last image really stirred a lot in me, and I’ve tried as best as I could to express that in music. The crystalline ice, the weak sun, the grass around the trees, the shade cast and the skyline. Dawn breaking through a thick coating of ice left by the night.
Busting out my meteorology degree for a moment, what you photographed was hoarfrost - which is a lovely example of a gas (water vapour in the air) turning straight into a solid (ice on the snow) without going through the liquid phase that we usually see in between. It’s the same phenomenon that causes a freezer to ice up. I’m glad you got to photograph it before the Sun’s rays melted it into a liquid, and then evaporated it back into a gas.
My musical interpretation of your work is fairly simple. It’s a cello sample, played through a delay pedal (the wonderfully-named Soma Cosmos Drifting Memory Station). The first half of the piece is in a minor key, with a high-pass filter allowing an icy build-up of higher frequencies. But as the track continues, it gradually morphs into a major key and the high frequencies melt away in favour of a warmer sound. By the time it ends, springtime has arrived.
I hope that springtime arrives for you soon, too.
— Duncan