16 Recordings of Ephemeral Percussion Ensembles

Audio files released by and/OAR. 2019. Listen.

Plows and shovels move snow all winter, making inadvertent monuments to the cold that outlast the season and store energy for a thermal exchange when the right conditions are met. When it finally warms, quiet assemblages spring into motion for a few fleeting days, as snowmelt trickles down eaves, gutters, pallets, sidewalks. I made most of these recordings on such a day in Providence, Rhode Island, when most of our winter snow melted.

With this musically-inflected metaphor I hope to underscore how these recordings oscillate between musical and documentary aesthetics, a tension uniquely brought forth by recording technologies.