Drone for the Jama Masjid

Part of the Sacred Spaces project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sacredspaces

Reimagined by Kim Rueger.

"I chose the original field recording (by Stuart Bowditch) because of its sense of space, and also because of the sounds coming not from within the mosque, but surrounding it. It struck me how even within the prayer room all the noise of daily city life was still present, although removed and at a distance. The acoustics seemed to reflect the purpose of the space: a haven to retreat and focus on otherworldly things, while still remaining in the world.

I started by trying to keep the sense of the original space, by using sections of the recording looped, with only minimal processing (a bit of EQ). One of those loops stays constant throughout, grounding the elements around it. The others float in and out in later sections, changing the focus of sound in the space as the piece goes on.

It happened that quite a few of the background street noises were in the same or complimentary musical keys. So, the random musical hum caught in the first loop became a main motif, echoed later in a synth line. A pair of beeping horns became an ostinato. Music floating into the room from somewhere nearby became the high, bell-like secondary melody that comes in around 2:20. To fill out and anchor the piece, I improvised a couple key-related drone parts, alternating between two chords (B major/D# minor), changing my voicing along the way. For this I used a couple of different patches on my Yamaha CS2x, played through either an Earthquaker Devices Avalanche Run reverb/delay pedal or an Old Blood Noise Dark Star pad reverb pedal.

There was such a rich cache of sounds in the field recording that the biggest challenge for me was choosing what to leave out, to try not to overwhelm the space. In working out which loops I wanted to use, I think I may have created enough alternative parts for at least one or two remixes (I could have done one entirely with just the birds). The drone version of the piece won out, though, because it seemed the best iteration to honor the spirit and the sound of the original location in Memory."