Ok, I promise, double promise, pinky double promise that this blog will not morph into a music blog. Why you might ask? Because it’s been scientifically proven that there is a far greater abundance of music blogs than there are even photography blogs. If you can believe that? Would science lie?
Nonetheless I just can’t resist talking about a new Harry Partch related release by Deathprod (Helge Sten). I’m sure there are at least billions of Harry Partch and Deathprod fans that read this blog, so maybe I should expound on at least Harry for a moment.
IMHO Harry Partch was one of the most brilliant musical minds of the last century. He was a classically trained composer who eventually concluded that the whole Western system of music was complete trash, burned all his own compositions and invented a 43 tone system of music, built the instruments to play that music and trained the musicians to play those instruments.
Deathprod was recently given full access to Harry Partch’s still extant instruments and wrote a score to be played on those instruments. He collaborated with the German group Musikfabrik who had replicas of Partch’s instruments built and learned to play them. No small task, this.
Sow Your Gold in the White Foliated Earth is then Musikfabrik playing Deathprod’s composition on replicas of Harry Partch’s instruments.
This is a great oversimplification, but it gets the gist of the thing across. If you’re into this sort of thing, Sow Your Gold is a marvel that reveals new depths on each listen. Unfortunately I know this will be almost no one’s sort of thing, so to soften the blow of writing about something so photographically irrelevant I’m including a photograph that is completely unrelated to the theme of this post. It’s only significance is that it’s one of the oldest scans I can find in my library.
The Daily Lumenbox 