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Heart of the Mountain

by SVB

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1.
Heart of the Mountain 20:52

about

I made a sound installation last summer via a short residency in conjunction with the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon in New Lebanon, NY. This piece is a "sonic map" of the Shakers' world, made completely of field recordings taken on site at four different Shaker settlements in New York and Massachusetts, and incorporating text and song from their vast archives. The piece conjures the Shaker's spiritual world via the physical traces they've left behind.

This was originally presented inside the museum's stone barn -- the largest stone barn in the USA, perhaps -- and included my installation of found objects arranged as an altar. The objects symbolized the Shakers’ “spiritual gifts” mentioned in many of the songs and texts incorporated into the piece, and act, as the field recordings do, as another analog between Shaker realities. Attendees were invited to lie down upon benches surrounding the altar, listening to the piece in its entirety while gazing up at the open sky. The configuration of the benches and altar resembled a large eye, a symbol often used in Shaker Gift Drawings.

Although most well known nowadays as being celibate furniture makers, the Shakers built a strong, resilient and accepting society upon their religious beliefs. They also held space for mystical experiences and direct contact with the spirit world. An outlier at their inception in the late 1700s, Shaker settlements became a model for alternative communities which cropped up across New York and farther west in the 1800s and beyond.

The Shakers' imprint upon American culture is substantial, if you look in the right places. They are a fascinating and prolific group of people with an incredibly rich collective body of work. This is my dedication to them.

CAVEAT: this is a somewhat rough mix! However, it's best listened to with good headphones.

For more information, visit shakerml.org.

credits

released August 17, 2019

Special thanks to Lacey Schutz and Jerry Grant of Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, Sarah Steadman of Mount Lebanon Residency, Kitty and Ellen Finkelpearl, Hancock Shaker Village and the Shaker Heritage Society.

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SVB Hudson, New York

Found sounds, droney stuff, astral blues, spooky pop, et cetera

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