Uploaded September 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Somewhere in Hélécine, a township in the French speaking part of Belgium an old windmill had been singing its song for many years with no one paying attention. Over the years it started singing louder and louder, until on Aug/10/2012 a sound recordist named "Flavien Gillié" heard it, and decided to record it using a contact microphone (listen here: aporee.org/maps/?loc=14348&snd=16701). In 2021, approximately 10 years later, I found it while looking for soundscapes recorded in my neighborhood (it's only half an hour driving from where I live) and its extraordinary musicality immediately drew my attention. Reason enough to go into a musical dialogue with it! And here is the result. The score obviously is a rough approximation, because nature doesn't fit into a regular time or pitch grid. What you hear is the unedited windmill recording, a transcription of the windmill for trumpet and a saxophone playing a second voice. The challenge here is to work with the given material (windmill noises) which cannot be modified. In that sense, it's like a musical Rorschach test :)
Somewhere in Hélécine, a township in the French speaking part of Belgium an old windmill had been singing its song for many years with no one paying attention. Over the years it started singing louder and louder, until on Aug/10/2012 a sound recordist named "Flavien Gillié" heard it, and decided to record it using a contact microphone (listen here: aporee.org/maps/?loc=14348&snd=16701). In 2021, approximately 10 years later, I found it while looking for soundscapes recorded in my neighborhood (it's only half an hour driving from where I live) and its extraordinary musicality immediately drew my attention. Reason enough to go into a musical dialogue with it! And here is the result. The score obviously is a rough approximation, because nature doesn't fit into a regular time or pitch grid. What you hear is the unedited windmill recording, a transcription of the windmill for trumpet and a saxophone playing a second voice. The challenge here is to work with the given material (windmill noises) which cannot be modified. In that sense, it's like a musical Rorschach test :)
![[Experimental] The meaning of life (Roland Integra-7)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ylF8iCwIYRg/mqdefault.jpg "[Experimental] The meaning of life (Roland Integra-7)
Another close reading - this time of an animated conversation between two persons (Alan and Karl). In just 3 minutes time they discuss the meaning of life. Ive transcribed their conversation for piano and saxophone and background noises for percussion. This video might get taken down at some point in the future since I did ask their permission to reuse their video, but didnt get any reply. You can visit their youtube channel and find the original video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3demFMgK6I .")
