Music for and from Haikus

“After the dancing / The wind in the pine trees / The voices of insects.” That brief poem was the subject of the 111th Naviar Haiku project. Naviar Haiku is a weekly project series, like the Disquiet Junto and the Stonesthrow Beat Battles, in which musicians respond to prompts. In the case of Naviar, each prompt is a haiku that the participating musicians then transform into sound. The musicians produce, in essence, a score to the words — not necessarily, if ever, to the melody inherent in the words, but to the images and narrative that the words express. I wrote the haiku for the 40th Naviar project (“There’s a lifetime in / between the first and second / clicks of the door’s lock”), which doubled as a Junto project (the 145th). Yesterday I wrote about another weekly project, Weekly Beats, through the lens of a recent piece that employed field recordings. Like the Weekly Beats, the Naviar puts a minimal constraint on the participants. In the hands of the musician who goes by noimspartacus (based in Birmingham, England), it’s a call for a whimsical, modest fantasia. Wind chimes give way to an underlying drone, out of which emerges a playful melody played on synthesized instruments. At first it’s a little organ or horn sound, but then a more high-pitched tone is introduced, drawing on the listener’s memory of that chime at the opening.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/noimspartacus. More from noimspartacus at noimspartacus.wordpress.com. More from the Naviar Haiku at naviarlab.tumblr.com.