Another Intensity by Philip Blackburn

If clouds could sing, composer and environmental sound artist Philip Blackburn would compose for them. His music is in tune with the vapors; of strata as they take shape and dissipate, of time as atmosphere, of shifting layers of tension and release, of ears as they stare into infinitude.

His new album, Another Intensity, is an expansive exploration of the natural world as a living, breathing concert hall. It is an invitation to listen to the organic stillness within motion, stasis and flux, and the contemplation of fleeting phenomena. In short, a sonic weather system of the mind.

The six works on Another Intensity share a sense of nature’s grand procession, revealing moments of wonder in the spaces between events. It discovers life in the cracks of perception. The album transports listeners to resonant caves, dense rainforests, and soundscapes of distant memory—journeying through both real and imagined places.

“I have never seen a straight line in nature. Dynamic, balanced chaos is my friend,” says Blackburn. “This music is an attempt to let loose beauty, to make it tactile, and intertwine with our attention. It’s about practicing the art of noticing the non-empty spaces between things. Of slowing down enough to appreciate the flow.”

The album features an intriguing range of sonic practices:
• Historic Reimaginings: Two pieces are radical reworkings of Blackburn’s earliest teenage compositions in England. In Praise of Clouds revisits an a cappella choral piece for a disembodied, floating boychoir, while Between Two Waves of the Sea imagines a vast spectral orchestra.
• Archaeoacoustic Ritual: Sounding Xibalba was recorded deep inside the sacred Maya underworld of Mountain Cow Cave in Belize. Blackburn awakens the uniquely resonant stalagmites and stalactites, surrounded by sacrificial human remains, and summons a whistling spirit with an ancient ceramic bat-flute—a magical experience where ears replace sight.
• The Unearthing Series: Two works follow the same creative blueprint where performers listen to a recording of a previous performance and attempt to play exactly what they hear. This process gives rise to Dawn Chorus, Still Life, a humid, sweltering duet with Australian sheng master Wang Zheng Ting (with Blackburn on bowed bicycle wheels), and An Illegible Stone, a dialogue between percussionist Patti Cudd and cellist Madeleine Shapiro searching for that elusive sound within the sound – the performance of heightened listening.
• Floating Beneath the Surface stretches a brief moment of musical time into an endless, meditative, sonic float tank.

Another Intensity is for those who understand that music, like life, lurks in the cross-fades—the transitory, momentary resolutions that hint at both rest and a new beginning. Or as T.S. Eliot put it, “We must be still and still moving, Into another intensity.”

Sometimes called “hallucinatory” or “ambient with heft,” Philip Blackburn’s music draws on a broad awareness of music history and environmental acoustics to suggest a singular organic whole. He studied music at Cambridge and the University of Iowa, counting avant-garde pioneers Kenneth Gaburo and Pauline Oliveros as mentors, and the idiosyncratic Harry Partch as a key inspiration. His work continues to be stimulated by the 800+ artists whose recordings he has produced over his career (for both innova and Neuma labels). He divides his time between Minnesota and Belize, depending on the season.

Philip Blackburn was born in Cambridge, England, and studied music there and at the University of Iowa with Kenneth Gaburo. He is a public artist specializing in sound — a composer/environmental sound-artist. Blackburn’s works have been heard in ships’ harbors, state fairs, forests, and coming out of storm sewers, as well as in galleries, parking lots, and on concert stages.

philipblackburn.com