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64 Verses for Crane Fly

by Ryan Wade Ruehlen

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about

This album began in the late winter of 2020, coinciding with the development of the COVID-19 pandemic as it spread across the world. The entirety of the recording process happened to lead up to the first quarantine shutdown. However this album is not about a quarantine experience.

Rather it is composed in relation to the sudden arrival of the crane fly in the Sonoran desert in southern Arizona. This arrival, which is unusual, found the vast spread of flickering and out-of-kilter bodies throughout the landscape, and inside many people's homes. These docile creatures, which are known to only eat in the larval stages (many not developing mouths as they enter adulthood), have a life span of only a few weeks to about a month.

This album was recorded during that month. In this window of time the crane fly, with its incredibly long legs and delicate wings, appeared quietly and, what felt like over night, started to show up everywhere. Almost as suddenly as they swarmed into the area their corpses began to pile up in corners of the bathroom, under the window sills, on top of the bed sheets, or next to a glass of water.

The album strikes immediately, and then falls into silence. What is introduced as an environment of electro-acoustic anxiety moves in and out of playful phrases and somber eruptions. Tonally swaying in harmonic thresholds and textural glissando, by the middle of the first composition a fluttering, disoriented pastoral takes shape.

These two works center around a prepared Wurlitzer piano that was found on the side of the road and brought home in February 2020, right as the crane flies emerged from the soil. The hammers and strings were configured with tension altering objects throughout the harp inside the piano. Several microphones were placed inside the piano chamber to pick up physical resonance and slight changes in timbre. Along with woodwinds and strings that accompany the piano with swelling and scattering overtones, each instrument is cycled through a variety of synthesis that remains unresolved throughout the two movements.

Included in this recording is soprano saxophone, upright bass, numerous percussion objects, modular synthesizer, clarinet, flute, and harmonica. Most of the instrumentation was played acoustically into the piano's chamber, which gives a particular spatial relationship to all the sounds.

As the title suggests, this work is comprised of 64 intermingling passages recorded with four dual-diaphragm condenser microphones in a single room at sudden moments throughout the day, most days, for a month.

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released February 27, 2021

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aquietroom Nuremberg, Germany

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