Nature-Symphony 83
— Exploring Yon Lightning Chambers

Basic details

• Instrumentation — Field recording each of of solo Davis Blanchard Pluto and Debussy Bells 8-tube galvanized steel wind chimes, and of solo Indonesian bamboo wind chimes, medium and small.
• Original field recording locations / dates:
  Metal chimes on steep ground just below Hunting Gate, highest point on the Hunter's Path, on north side of the Teign Gorge (Drewsteignton, Devon, UK), February 2017. Bamboo chimes a little further west by Hunter's Path, on Piddledown (sic), November 2023.
• Processing and deployment: Each recording had its own layer, so there were four layers. All the chimes were slowed down, and given mostly strong cathedral reverb, but for the first time, after being slowed-down, the metal chimes were pitch-shifted upwards, and in the case of the Pluto chimes (Layer 1), that was towards the limit of good human hearing. The bamboo chimes are pitch-shifted downwards — the small one, helped by a rather less wallowing acoustic, being our grounding ‘anchor’, while the medium one is way down, often sounding powerful and thunderous.
  

  Full details of this rather complex deployment on this work's Freesound page, where you can find an explanation of anvil crawlers and their strange behaviour.

• Distinguishing features — This was first conceived just as an experiment to see if a Nature-Symphony could be effective with at least one metal chimes layer pitch-shifted up, for a change, into the stratosphere — or, more realistically, upper troposphere. This notion suggested to me that the likely powerful play of the Pluto chime's strange morphing intervals and chords at that very high level would subjectively suggest the play of well-developed anvil crawler lightning displays in an intense large-scale thunderstorm system — and so it worked out.
  

  The bamboo chimes are both in their different ways anchoring elements that give coherence and meaning to that play of strange high tones and their morphing weird harmonic shiftings. I did nothing beyond choice of chime and the right degree of downward pitch-shifting, and adding the right reverb, to simulate thunder; I left the rest to Mother Nature.