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Dawn Koras

by Adam Tinkle

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1.
Circumambulations 04:51
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2.
Scaffold and Symmetry (Patan Museum Courtyard) 05:00
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3.
Compass/ion (Emptying Butter Lamps at Boudhanath) 03:41
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4.
\/monium x Dawn Chorus 07:23
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5.
One Kora at Shree Gah 04:50
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6.
Summoner's Seminar 06:08
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about

I work between music and documentary sound, so some attunement to the musical qualities of everyday life is an inevitability -- but also a gift. And even though I came to Nepal with the intention of trying to further braid my field recording practice into new musical compositions, Kathmandu has exceeded even my expectations in how profoundly it has made me question the divisions between the disparate ways I practice: in sounds, images, concepts, and as a body in space.
Littering the Kathmandu landscape are reminders to listen -- the “Om” symbol painted on chortling trucks, the choir of little puja bells that spill out of the windows of neighboring buildings. Construction, ritual, traffic, birds: these sounds count among the innumerable energies, coursing through bodies and cities, which may first present themselves to the traveler as a knot of overwhelm, but slowly reveal themselves as patterned, meaning-laced flows in time. Sensing these, along with the valley’s iconic sacred geography, rouses me to humble mimicry.
The repetition of the white stupa form, along with its attendant wheels and bells at every scale, iterate across the city from macrocosm to microcosm -- stirring me to reconsideration of how (and why) I copy and paste.
Bronze deities’ many arms and heads capture change and multiplicity in the immediacy of a changeless now, and are, in this way, not unlike the adjacent frames of a video, or the impossible image of a frozen sound. The tangle of telephone lines in the landscape and the lines rendered by my sound editing software echo off one another, fusing into a calligraphy of the quotidian and the cosmic. I think of Joni Mitchell, when she spotted the trails of six jet planes: “it was the hexagram of the heavens, it was the strings of my guitar.” Among the findings of this month: the spectrogram of the audio frequencies of the spinning prayer wheel actually itself resembles the prayer wheel! But probably, so too do the ceaseless sirens going around the traffic circle outside my window, at Maitighar Mandala. In whatever case, if these rising, spiraling lines point towards deeper listening, they will not have been a false alarm.

credits

released November 9, 2021

All sounds (field recordings, vocals, Bb clarinet, sound synthesis, mix) by Adam Tinkle, while in residence at Space A, Kathmandu.
Special thanks to Neda Haffari and Jupiter Pradhan of Space A for the incredible month here; to Saro Mahato of Bikalpa Art Center; to Ben Bogin for the many pre-departure conversations about the sacred valley, to Tom Yoshikami and Nawang Gurung for all things Pandemic Bardo, to Sienna Craig, whose book, "The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York" emboldened me to craft my own koras, to my lil' sangha in Troy, NY, and to Alice, Milo, Amanda, Jennifer and Jess for all the support during my time away.

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Adam Tinkle Saratoga Springs, New York

I’m an artist/educator, working in media art, performance, documentary, music, and collaborarion. After studies in experimental music with avant-garde legends Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, Anthony Davis, and Pauline Oliveros, and then some touring in bands, goatherding, community radio and grad school, I moved to New York and now teach at Skidmore College. ... more

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