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Music of Shadows

by Philip Blackburn

supported by
Laurent Wermenlinger
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Jim Flannery
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1.
Dry Spell 26:59 video
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2.
Still Points 17:38
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3.
The Long Day Closes 25:58
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about

Philip Blackburn’s music has been called trippy, hallucinatory, intense, and riveting. Music of Shadows, his follow up to the 2012 Ghostly Psalms (innova 246), is all those things and more. Verging on transcendental, it contains three substantial works that are explorations of ways of listening as much as they are music in the usual sense. They offer sensually sonic worlds to inhabit and wallow in; ambient landscapes of the dreaming mind and what you might hear there.

Two of them began as underground soundscape installations, as part of Blackburn’s Sewer Pipe Organ — to be played back inside St. Paul’s storm drain system near the Mississippi. The sounds emerging from manholes across a wide area brought awareness to the acoustic spaces normally hidden from daily consciousness. One work, Dry Spell, started as a steampunk cityscape of lost children amidst invisible Victorian factories, and distant voices of heavenly choirs and innocents trapped in forgotten playgrounds. By contrast, Still Points, is a more geometrical fantasy on the overtones of the 60-cycle electrical hum; a dance of pure rhythmic proportions (made on a recreation of Cowell and Theremin’s Rhythmicon instrument).

The final work, The Long Day Closes, is a modest statement on mortality originally created as the soundtrack to part of Blackburn’s film, The Sun Palace — an experimental multimedia work paying tribute to the TB era and one particular Colorado sanatorium where some of his ancestors chased the cure. With a 40-voice chorus from UC-Colorado Springs, instrumental ensemble, tape, and a solo clarinet recording by Bob Paredes added long after his death, the music is a sustained, soaring homage to those who live at the cusp of life and death every day. The sensation is not too far from classics such as Bryars’ The Singing of the Titanic or Ives’ The Unanswered Question.

The world of vision has shades of light and dark, densities, movement, and space, with transparent layers and areas of focus. Blackburn’s sound world likewise maps the inner ear to the outer world in stunningly imaginative, time-defying ways; leaving impressions and shadows in its wake.

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released March 27, 2021

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Philip Blackburn Saint Paul, Minnesota

Philip Blackburn was born in Cambridge, England, and studied music there and at the University of Iowa with Kenneth Gaburo. He is a public artist specializing in sound — a composer/environmental sound-artist. Blackburn’s works have been heard in ships’ harbors, state fairs, forests, and coming out of storm sewers, as well as in galleries, parking lots, and on concert stages.

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