Saltern present a remastered edition of Yoshi Wada’s The Appointed Cloud (1987), a work which Wada has often said is his favorite of his own. Staged at the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science, The Appointed Cloud was Wada’s first large-scale, interactive installation and featured a custom pipe organ, among other homemade instruments, controlled by a computer equipped with a customized interface and software designed by engineer David Rayna, known for his work with La Monte Young. This recording captures the opening performance for which Wada brought together four musicians on bagpipes (Wada, Bob Dombrowski, and Wayne Hankin) and percussion (Michael Pugliese) to perform with the installation, operated by David Rayna.
In Wada’s own words: “This performance [of The Appointed Cloud] was one of the most memorable performances I've done. The space itself—the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science—was incredible. The building was designed for the 1964-65 World’s Fair and had spaceships hanging from the ceiling so people felt like they were traveling in outer space. It was an amazing experience with the sound of the pipe organ, sheet metal, pipe gong, and bagpipes all together. 60 minutes may seem like a long duration, but it didn't feel like it.”
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Composed by Yoshi Wada
Sound installation instruments—pipe organ, sirens, tall sheet metal, pipe gong, etc.—provided by Yoshi Wada
Computer interface engineering and software: David Rayna
Bagpipes: Yoshi Wada, Bob Dombrowski, and Wayne Hankin
Timpani and tam-tam: Michael Pugliese
Recorded live by John Driscoll on November 8, 1987
Digital transfer by Sonicraft A2DX Lab
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu
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Saltern, 2021
Yoshi Wada is a composer and artist associated with the downtown New York experimental art scene of the last fifty years. Wada was born in 1943 in Kyoto, Japan. He studied sculpture at the Kyoto University of Fine Arts, and then moved to New York in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, Wada began building homemade musical instruments and writing compositions for them based on his personal research in timbre, resonance, and improvisation with the overtone series. He studied music composition with La Monte Young, North Indian singing with Pandit Pran Nath, and Scottish bagpipe with James McIntosh and Nancy Crutcher. Wada's recorded works are published by Japanese record labels EM Records and Edition Omega Point.
