new song... sort of.

this isn't so much a song as it is an exercise to try to improvise for more than 10 minutes to the sound of a large, long-sustaining temple bell being run 12 times, so i called it "rings twelve times at twelve." it's probably best listened to at night somewhat quietly when things are calming down and you're just laying around zoning out on the internet or smoking the "refer" or whatever you damn kids do these days.

i went to horyu temple in nara the other day. it wasn't the first time i'd been there, but this time i came prepared: i brought my zoom h4 to record the sound of a somewhat large bell which is rung every hour on the hour a number of times equal to the hour at which it's rung; thus, at 12 noon, when i was there, it was rung 12 times. the dynamic range of the bell was quite large. standing about 5 meters away from it, the sound would vibrate your body when initially struck and sustain for over a minute as it faded into the background, putting out a constant, slowly-beating sine wave around 155 hertz.

anyway, since i love playing trombone to all sorts of things (i once got a book of artwork from the library and improvised to the paintings inside!), i couldn't resist playing along with the recording i made when i got back home. the rolling sine wave was almost a d-flat, so i messed around for a while in d-flat and eventually settled on a scale i liked that's a lydian dominant with a flat 2 (in d-flat, it'd be d-flat, d, f, g, a-flat, b-flat, b). i considered using the indian purvi thaat, which is similar to the lydian dominant b2 i settled on, but i couldn't get comfortable in that one. i also considered just playing totally free and not sticking to any particular scale or anything at all, but it's kind of fun to put limitations on yourself in these situations to see what you can do with them. that way you end up focusing on one thing and doing more with it rather than focusing on lots of things but not doing much with them. it's like mr. kai, an old skirt-chasing japanese teacher i used to work with, once told me: "in japanese we have a saying: if you go after two rabbits, you won't catch either.' so you should focus on just one" (for anyone who reads japanese, it's 二兎追うもの一兎も得ず). of course, he was talking about trying to score with women half his age, but still... i'm reminded of that idiom here, and i never pass up an opportunity to mention mr. kai's philanderous exploits.

you're welcome.