Welcome to Bells, Bugs, Whispers & Plinks. We are your hosts, Edward Ruchalski (Syracuse, NY) and Stephen Bradley (Baltimore, MD)

Today’s broadcast consists of new solo works created over the past few months while in quarantine. Bradley’s contributions were created using small motors employed to vibrate and strike sonic objects. He became obsessed by the overtones, and rhythmic structures that subtly change over time. The anomaly in the collection is Winter House, composed from recordings made during a significantly cold period last January. He focused on minuscule sounds generated from furnace pipes and radiators throughout the house that heated up and cooled down; hissing, popping and sizzling through the night.

Ruchalski’s tracks are from a new album called Invisible Giants. It consists of short pieces that focus on a single sound source or two. All the sound sources are fairly weak and quiet. To compensate for the microsounds, he used a microphone that was very close to the sound to illuminate the different timbres and dynamics, making them much more pronounced. Ruchalski in his own words, “It’s fascinating how the microphones alter their sonic personalities. They become very different and powerful.”

The last piece is a collaboration between Ruchalski and Bradley. Remotely, in their studios in Syracuse and Baltimore, they began with the same samples that were plugged into their composition software and then, performed simultaneously, employing a series of simple rules for when the samples were triggered and when the embellishments were incorporated. Each artist recorded their own performance that was mixed together afterward resulting in the following composition.

Playlist:
Invisible Giants 1, Ruchalski, 2:00
Invisible Giants 2, Ruchalski, 2:07
Sky, Bradley, 4:24
Invisible Giants 3, Ruchalski, 1:52
Invisible Giants 4, Ruchalski, 1:57
Migraine, Bradley, 5:25
Invisible Giants 5, Ruchalski, 2:11
Invisible Giants 6, Ruchalski, 2:50
Winter House, Bradley, 4:32
Invisible Giants 7, Ruchalski, 1:59
Invisible Giants 8, Ruchalski, 2:00
Single Malt, Bradley, 3:23
Invisible Giants 9, Ruchalski, 1:09
Invisible Giants 10, Ruchalski, 1:29
Snake, Bradley, 3:04
Invisible Giants 11, Ruchalski, 2:03
Objective Swing, Bradley, 2:28
Duet, Bradley & Ruchalski, 10:22

Bells, Bugs, Whispers & Plinks radio program is inspired by a Wave Farm artist-residency that Bradley and Ruchalski were awarded in summer 2019 that focuses on composed, chance, and found sounds based on different places from around the globe. Other works we are interested in broadcast are based on concepts of serialism and ultra-rationality, acoustic ecology, aleatory and anti-rational, musique concrète, microtonal, lowercase, sound/noise, synthetic and ambient phonographic spaces. Please contact Bradley at (sbradley@umbc.edu) or Ruchalski (edward.ruchalski@gmail.com) for information about the program or submission inquiries.