Distant Thunder
Composer: Maggi Payne
For me Distant Thunder conjures up images of being in the desert while watching distant thunderstorms roll across the sky, accompanied by the unforgettable sweet smell of desert rain. These storms are particularly beautiful as the rain clouds build, break apart, and re-form, sending tendrils of rain down, most evaporating long before they touch the desert floor.
I intended to use the sounds of a resonant floor furnace and various adhesive tapes slowly unrolling as the primary sound sources, but after recording the furnace, I boiled water for tea, and could not resist recording the sonic patterns that emerged. I did use the sound of the furnace, but the tape unrolling was used only to impart spatialization through convolution to other, more stationary sources.