2024 April Catskill Listening Club Offerings

In attendance this month were Steph Spera, Dave Alglow, Rodney Greenblat, David Garland, Abigail Simon, Jared Mezzochi, and Jimmy Garver

Steph Spera shared a piece called breath. Made of vocal samples and lots of delay, reverb, and reverse delay. He used an arpeggeator on the vocals. Steph was appreciative listening outside of his studio and said it sounded very different in the living room. We talked a lot about reverberation and what it means to Finish something. 

breath _Spera_jan 24.mp3

Dave Aglow (first time attendee. welcome Dave!) shared a gorgeous recording that he made in a part of the Amazon called Lupuna. Dave has been going to the Amazon to make field recordings for the past 12 years and has built a strong relationship with a local community there. The recording he shared with us tonight was taken at the base of an enormous tree - the biggest he’s ever seen. Dave is working with club member Jon Cohrs to sequence his Amazon recordings and create an album’s worth of listening. He has recordings of the forest environment and recordings of songs sung by people there. He’s considering how to sequence these, thinking about establishing the sound of the forest and interspersing this with sung songs which “emerge” from the forest. 

Lupuna Night 3_21_24 Part 1.mp3

Rodney Greenblat has been going through hid Dad’s old stuff. He unearthed an Olympus recorder, probably one of the first consumer models made after the magnetic tape era. That’s right, a digital recorder. Rodney made a very small diorama of him playing his synth. We looked at it as we listened to a few of Rodney’s songs (whose names escape me now). Rodney has an outsized interest in digital nostalgia and is sometimes preoccupied with analog sound and its ephemra (hiss, gears, etc.) and recreating that in the digital environment; replication, history, old and new. What’s nostalgia? Can it be manufactured? Why? 

David Garland shared a new Garlands track with us called Black Locust. This one is all resonator guitar. He also shared a new foray into the reshaping of his 2007 album Noise In You called Diorama. He’s made small timing fixes and added some bass.

02 Diorama.mp3
01 Black Locust.mp3