Cloud Journey by Noise Reduction Society

Many years ago I discovered a small book, "The Narrow Road to the Interior." It is a collection of Haiku and prose written by the Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho. On the surface it is a well known travel diary. But as most things, there are many levels or facets to what is seen and unseen. One translation renders his words of the introduction, "I too for years past have been stirred by the sight of a solitary cloud drifting with the wind to ceaseless thoughts of roaming."

Cloud Journey is also landscape in sound. Whenever I travel by air, i am fascinated by the cloud landscape. The beauty, the colors, the shapes, and the vast panorama of space that streams by outside my window completely captivates me. The experience reminds me that windows of every shape and kind are portals to a reality of multiple dimensions, whether it is at 35,000 feet or at street level.

In an abstract sense, these compositions are imaginary viewpoints or soundtracks to imagined scenes moving across my thought. Clouds, trees, roadways, fields, city streets, buildings, people, my shoes as I look down upon my steps on a path. They are all ephemeral glimpses in thought of substantial realities that exist in a metaphysical universe.

Recorded at Breezeway Studios in July and August, 2022. Instruments used: Moog Voyager, Fender Rhodes Mark I, Yamaha G3 grand piano, Modal Electronics Cobalt8x, Arturia Pigments, Spitfire Labs, Native Instruments Reaktor, original sample instruments in Kontakt, Alchemy, and 1/4" reel-to-reel tape loops of ambient sounds in Tokyo and at home. Recorded and mixed in Logic Pro X.

Tracklist

1.	Circles in the dark	3:38

2.	Threshold of leaving	5:00

3.	At once upon the dawn	4:10

4.	Searching for light	4:39

5.	The narrow road towards clouds	3:51

6.	The Pass of Remembering	5:09

7.	Winter descending	5:02

8.	Lost in the forest of shadows	3:51

9.	Across summits of perception	4:17

10.	Golden clouds	2:48

11.	Chant of the winds	4:09

12.	Clouds whispering	5:21

13.	The Valley of Clouds	3:13

14.	For now, then	5:29

Credits

released January 5, 2023

Composed and produced by James Hegarty under his moniker Noise Reduction Society.

Hegarty has been composing and producing ambient music since the mid-70's. At first, the music was piano improvisations recorded to reel-to-reel tape and distributed informally on cassette. in the 80's he toured the midwest performing original ambient live compositions. At that time he was playing a Yamaha WX-7 over pre-recorded MIDI tracks rendered in real time. MIDI tracks were mixed interactively using Cubase in a style that predated Ableton Live session practices. In the 90's and 2000's he produced several studio albums incorporating hardware and software instruments and prominently featured vocal samples, studied and worked extensively with electroacoustic processing of instrument sounds using a NeXT computer workstation, and produced multimedia concerts in Chicago and New York.

For the past decade his music has incorporated the unity of acoustic instruments, analog synthesis, and digital processing of acoustic sound.

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