Australian player Jon Rose known and loved by many for decades as an improvising violinist in many international groupings, producer of art music and a regular name in the Recommended Records catalogue, in recent years growing increasingly experimental and creator of projects on a grand scale. His Aeolian Tendency (ROOM40 RM4219) gives a snapshot of his continuing work with “wind harps”. He starts out describing the unknowable and powerful force of the wind and nature in general (apparently welcoming its destructive and confusing energy), then provides details of how he constructs his devices, as if he was giving instructions for the building of a new Ark, down to the last cubit. He’s been building these wind harps since 1979. It’s part of his wider quest in life, to understand more about the properties of vibrating strings. Here with these harps which he calls “The Tube” and “The Monolith”, he’s also able to adjust the tunings of the strings, which he does not as a scientist nor a meteorologist nor a field-recording expert, but as a musician. His skill and experience with the violin has given him decades of intuitive knowledge he can draw on. Four long tracks of strange and unusual harmonics are the result, producing sound and music far beyond the reach of one man or even an entire orchestra, and showing how well Rose has aligned his instincts with the natural forces of the wind. (10/06/2024)
