Teleidoscope on a Family Picnic with back-catalog/Meditation (Double Feature)

I have two episodes in one here: One is all bass and one is all field recordings. It’s like choose your own adventure.

I needed to meditate on some stuff last week, and so I chose to do the show unaccompanied (for the most part, I did cheat a little bit halfway through with the help of my sister Isabelle). I haven’t done this in quite a while! I used to do this much more when I first started out doing the show. Contained within are some coded messages, and like I said before the live broadcast, it’s devoted to my sister and mom. (Last week I helped my sister move into college! Yikes!)

I felt that it was nice to put some large constraints on the show, so this week I did only field recordings. I’ve been sitting on a surplus of field recordings for a little bit, so this was a good way to use a good amount. Featured in the first half are recordings for Brianna’s first big horse show out here in Washington, as well as Brianna’s grandpa’s 90th birthday picnic and Brianna’s grandpa mowing the lawn to celebrate the end of summer. The second half of the show is ~2 minutes worth of sound randomly taken from the back catalog of field recordings I’ve taken (>24 hours) by my computer and looped on top of itself in a teleidoscopic fashion. What is a teleidoscope? It is a kaleidoscope which uses a big lens instead of beads and bits and glass for the source material for the mirror-mandala. This way it uses the outside world for the image. Did you know there is a kaleidoscope underworld that all meets at the Brewster Society Kaleidoscope Convention every June? (Named after Sir David Brewster who is the inventor of the kaleidoscope). They’ve figured out how to use mirrors in such a way that the seen image is a three-dimensional orb or polyhedron instead of a flat bicycle wheel sort of thing. Their website specifically talks about ergonomics of the kaleidoscope which enable extended viewing time.