To this end I delayed completing the piece for several years until I could revisit the site and be sure to acknowledge its sonic identity within the tunings and structures I made for this sound piece.
I realized I had to bring this parallel life of sound into my plans for the music. We were hearing each other and sometimes our own movements returned to us unrecognizable. Footfalls sounded duplicated, delayed and shifted. A word spoken on the rim of the crater might be heard from within the central chamber underground.
Footsteps, breathing, etc were bounced and amplified around the spaces over considerable distances with confusing clarity. My companion and I were entirely alone and exploring opposite sides of the crater yet both experienced - at first, alarming - illusions of hidden activity within the chambers. Walking the silent site one blistering August afternoon during a break in the construction schedule I experienced the full extent of the acoustic design. Mac users control/click and save to desktop Even at Roden events can eclipse the scale of our visions. The next afternoon massive anvils of cloud threaded with lightning congealed like inverted mountains under the perfect blue skies. Last time I was there, at twilight, two vast sand storms rolled independently across the Painted Desert into the crater. The visitor will always be subject to variations in the weather and light and to the movement of both subject (the heavens) and vehicle for viewing (earth). When you are at Roden you have no control of your experience despite the extraordinary precision of the buildings. They pass, they overlap, new events are formed through collision but each is really an isolated incidence adrift from the others. All the contributing musicians worked in isolation and the interrelationship of their contributions is more a matter of physics than design. There is a profound sense in which our need for narrative and resolution is absent both in the landscape and the experience of the Roden project so I needed the piece to force this "non-relationship" of parts and events. In making this piece I was determined to capture some sense of the immense time scale expressed both in Roden Crater's design (some apertures are made to view events of incredible infrequency, some will not happen in our lifetimes) and in the astronomical calendar. This music is made up of 147 elements (ranging from single notes to extended phrases) that orbit 1 single point (the listener) both over time and by moving in the sound field very slowly across the 6 channels over the duration of 5 hours.
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