Highly recommended, easily one of my favorite things I have posted in months. This “Feedback Raga”is an intense, Fourth World rhythmic drone created on a makeshift thumb piano, or kalimba. The device was made by RP Collier of Portland, Oregon. By his own explanation, the thumb piano is “made from a metal clamshell box with hairpin tines attached to a flat metal dish resonator,”the dish acting “like a feedback antenna.”A piezo microphone transforms the notes into dense, overtone rich columns of noise, and the feedback bends notes into one another and develops this overwhelming undercurrent of electric activity — an undercurrent of current. The picture above is from Collier’s flickr.com set.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/rpcollier. More of Collier’s music at rpcollier.bandcamp.com. Collier sent me the links via email earlier this week, right after I had posted the Alarm Will Sound rendition of composer Asha Srinivasan’s chamber orchestra ragas.
With the artist’s permission, I uploaded a remix here: https://soundcloud.com/l-a-j-1/power-raga-feedback-raga-remix