This track came about last year. It has been shelved for the past 6 months because it is/was so heavily loaded. It explores the heartbeat which has become a bit of a leitmotif in my compositions over the last 6-12 months.  It is also a reflection of my obsession with the ocean. I think it's a drifting ship, maybe taking on water, lost in the middle of the ocean and at night.
The chanting sounds are from a field recording of the wind pushed through a variety of effects.
The row boat and the heartbeat sample are from Freesound.org. 
The vocals are my own.

#thalassophile
#heartofdarkness

Composed & produced in a loft in Cornwall by Sky High Diamonds. 


Searchlight (Glimmer Mix) is a 'deeper' remixed version :https://soundcloud.com/skyhighdiamonds/searchlight-glimmer-mix

Searchlight ~ Beats. Breath. Silence.

From the Unborn collection which explores human connectivity - when we have it and when we don't.

"Sensory, censor me, sentence me, sensory."
"Beat, beat, beat...finally found the chorus..."

Unborn is a collection that is built around vocal instrumentality. Every track starts out as a thin vocal sketch, mainly created by live vox looping experiments, then developed with additional sounds, samples and vox processes.

Sensory ~ U n b o r n

The composition and recording started on the beach at Gunwalloe Church Cove, The Lizard, Cornwall, home to The Church of The Storms. It was high tide, a full moon, a wild and vibrant visual and aural experience. Originally my focus was on the little churchyard above the beach, the graves, tombs, chambers, hollow like oubliettes. Sound travelled all around me, shifting tides, transience,  crashing waves and screaming winds, overhead, underneath, enveloping me, I was rooted to the ground.

http://www.britainexpress.com/counties/cornwall/churches/gunwalloe.htm

Lyrics/words: 

"Hold me now (screams) dead or alive. 
Hold my heart (screams) dead or alive."

Composed and produced by Sky High Diamonds.
January 2018

Video by Sky High Diamonds: https://youtu.be/FpKIhjea2xc

The Church Of The Storms

"Darting through tunnels with torches alight, we move with the rats. Combing like watchmen, before hurtling into the woodland, merging with trees; the sounds of hooves and far off screams. 
We stop suddenly at the edge. Lean forward, peering inwards. 
Silence. 
Only our breaths. 
Then, we hear those drums again. 
We shout up at the stars and light bigger torches as the darkness cloaks in. I wrap you in skins and furs; we burn all of the dead flesh and then sing over the bones.”

https://skyhighdiamonds.bandcamp.com/album/over-your-bones-lp

Toma Kula

Cornwall's shadowy seas with their deep undertows, drifting tides and scraping, seeping tones are the inspiration for this 30 minute live set. As this builds from scratch, each layer is experimentally woven into a tapestry of drone, hum and thrum. Frequency, sound and autonomous rhythms unfurl like distant melodies lost out to sea. 

The three compositions fall somewhere between music and narrative, existing in the moment as a form of dark ambient sound poetry, created from electronic hardware and percussion, with a flicker of instrumentation and voice.

First performed live on the 9th November 2019 in the Town Chambers at Falmouth Art Gallery, Cornwall, and as part of an electronic ambient music event arranged by Cornish based label eel.disc (EEL 006).

Instruments: Volca Modular, Volca FM, Volca Sample, tuning forks, singing bowl, baroque tenor recorder, random percussion, looped and over dubbing live vocal.
Full live set releases on January 11th 2020 via Bandcamp:

https://skyhighdiamonds.bandcamp.com/track/sea-chorus

Sea Chorus Live Set (Preview)

“So long as the mind struggles in the dark to find a way, the way cannot be found. The mind must cast away its opaqueness and be transparent so that the path may be illumined” (Rohit Mehta). 

Working deeply on this track carried me through the darkest days of the lockdown. In all that strangeness and uncertainty to be working on a remix for Ashtoreth and Greymalkin was both life affirming and inspiring. The time spent within their alchemical composition, The Veil, was indeed an “illumined path.” These 'Hermit' Remixes, along with the original 'Hermit' tracks from Grey Malkin and Ashtoreth are available for download on Bandcamp at:

https://thehareandthemoon.bandcamp.com/album/hermit-remixes

and: 

https://ashtoreth1.bandcamp.com/album/hermit-remixes

The merging of these two richly creative musicians is a pleasure to work with, their live dynamic and the intertwining of their musical sensibilities immersed me into their mysterious worlds. It was an honour to be asked to step into these shimmering realms.

The Veil (Unveiled Mix)

I hear the planet sing as it plummets into a sonorous darkness, a strange uncertainty laced with interferences; white noise, brown noise, red noise, all the noises, in a tangible distortion, like every sound I have ever heard pushed through one hundred distortion pedals at once. 

The stars hum in a low mussitation, distinguishable against the rhoncus rattle of people, places and things in a rising and falling glissando of sleepy and awake. The muffled cacophony of breath against breath, whistling, singing, mirrored in the whispering trees. These eolian instruments invoke a doppler effect as we rotate around each other, my binaural perception altered by every movement, becoming boomy, then tinny, then zing. I never knew I could orchestrate with trees. Then just as I am wrapped entirely in a sonic envelope of frequencies, I locate a rhythm of heartbeats and hoofbeats, the pulsing paradiddle of further resounding aliveness. 

I feel the compression closing in all around me, attenuating, boosting, clamping, I grasp for some dynamic headroom to make sense, to find closure, to resolve, to normalise. But there is nothing but the tintinnabulation of bells, beautiful shimmering chimes, in the distance somewhere over there, as they have always been. 

And in the fury and clamour I realise that when it goes dark the lights come on. This is the essence of ‘Glowball,’ a three track sonic pilgrimage on meditations with a Microkorg in times of global weirdness. 
credits
released November 22, 2020

Voice sample taken from Paul Stamets Lecture, Chicago Green Festival, 2009 

Title: Mushrooms Can Save the World 

Upload Date: August 13th 2012 

Author/Archivist: Monte Barry 

Source: Archive.org 

License: creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

from Glowball, released November 22, 2020  available for download at: 

https://skyhighdiamonds.bandcamp.com/album/glowball

Hypnagogia

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§onic Ritual§ 
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musician | sound artist 〓〓

Sky High Diamonds

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