*50 copies limited edition* "Enough sun finally came up on the Wyoming prairie that I could relax my fears. I shut off the studio lights and watched a dune of snow reveal itself under the squat, black graphs of denuded trees. I drank old coffee. In a rare interview, Wendell Berry defended a concept of community as being a collection of all the living things that surround you. The farmer-poet was careful to clarify that this community wasn’t simply made up of those like you but must also include the creatures—human or otherwise—that you find uncomfortable, maybe even abhorrent.
A deeply political, if simple, idea, Berry’s definition of community was particularly prophetic. As I sit in the midst of a culture eating itself by denying the reality of its differences, his inclusiveness and admonition to attempt empathy toward every member of our living »family« has embedded itself in me. And it was the topic of many a softly whispered, one-way conversation in February 2025—when these pieces were composed—as I watched the Wyoming sun come up again and again over a mountain of snow. A light flashed across the highway regularly; intervals of three-quarters of a second, if I were to guess. Two flashes each second-and-a half anyway. Four every three. Eighty every sixty. My bucolic hopes dashed by math and man, I went to find my phone.
This music is an experiment in translating Berry’s ideals into sound. After a year and a half of making beautiful recordings of the Columbia River with Annea Lockwood, I began to wonder if I was only paying attention to the worth of the natural sounds that pleased me, setting aside, for example, the noises that are a remnant of humanity’s need to be made existent through the roar of its machines. »A Fine Rain Anoints The Canal Machinery« is an attempt to build a contrapuntal composition that embraces the confluence between humans and their machines and the uncaring nature they pass through. Recordings of water are interrupted by cars speeding over a bridge. An inlet is roiled by the diesel engines of fishing trawlers. The delicate sounds of wind through reeds and bull steers scratching themselves on a dead tree are underpinned by an eighteen-wheeler balling itself down a valley highway.
As a conceptual work, it is a failure. In my attempt to filter Berry’s ideas through our machine-driven experience of nature, I have instead created a soundscape of loneliness, a reminder of what it was to be in a cabin on the prairie in the snow, watching the sun come up, separated from my animal community by glass, insulation, and drywall. Signs of life reveal themselves, and I’m no longer alone. Drifting snow has leveled the animal tracks overnight, but one can still discern the sinuous waves of the mink from the elegant, contained hoof-holes of the white-tailed deer. The most recent tracks I made myself: deep and sloppy breakings of the ice crust, clumsy and savage." - Nate Wooley
