You have to check this out: The Tunnel Singer
From the site:
In 1995 a friend told me about an unusual “tunnel” in Port Townsend, Washington (PT). He used words like “other worldly” and “mystical” to describe sounds uttered in an underground water catch at old Fort Worden in PT. He told me the reverberation lasted an amazing forty-five seconds before it faded completely…. I have sung and recorded in spaces with an 8-second long reverberation, but preparing to sing a space where each note lasts 45-seconds stretched my imagination. I listened to Stuart Dempster, Paul Horn and whales. I considered renting studio time to practice singing in an electronically created long reverberation. I dreamed of being underwater.
About eight months ago I was really into the idea of moving out to this same spot and trying to get a residency at the Fort Worden State park and record albums in these abandoned (and supposedly haunted) ruins. Now I see that someone has already done it – and that there is a giant “cistern” there waiting to be played inside of !!! Miss Shoemaker apparently didn’t have the upper body strength to go down into the cistern, so as far as I know it is still has not technically been played inside of (she just sang down into it).
My friend (and new roommate) Ryan and I are preparing to write up a draft so that we can get down there and play! Listen to those clips of her singing, it’s totally amazing.
By the way, I just remembered that I put up some new clips of The Datura Blues on the site, but haven’t extended any links. Ryan brought them up when he moved here, and they are the last show I played with that band back in Arcata almost two years ago. We’re currently trying to set up an orchestra all via craigslist (we’ve got electric violinists, trombone-ist, sax’s (etc) all meeting this Sunday!). These Datura Blue clips are pretty upbeat and fun compared to some of the more melacholy spacey stuff you can already find on the site under “Tribal Music”. But here, check them out too:
1. Sunset Ave.
2. Herbal Perts Psychadelic Grass Band
3. Happy Birthday
4. Follow the Green Song
One of my favorite dark ambient works is Heresy by Lustmord. “Heresy is the culmination of work carried out from 1987 to 1989 and utilizes subterranean location recordings originated within crypts, caverns, mines, deep shelters and catacombs together with material of a seismic and volcanic origin. The work also takes advantage of psycho-acoustic phenomena and the physical effects of low frequency information.” I don’t know if you’re into this genre, but if you happen to find it for a few bucks on the used bin it’s worth picking up. It’s quite spectacular to listen to on a stormy night.
G, you know what wa really interesting about re-reading your old journal entry about Fort Worden from April was seeing all the spam comments that got tagged onto it, especially the ones that seemed to refer to those sites that will help you improve your google pagerank. I read an interesting article on google in the October issue of wired that was talking about how all these competitors and hackers want to sponsor legislation to make google a publicly-regulated utility. Their argument is that the google pagerank algorithm should be made public domain, since the success of any online endeavor depends to strongly on it, and since e-commerce is the wave of the future, etc.. I have no doubt that google vs. the federal government will become a supreme court constitutional issue before the end of the decade. Crazy shit.