Come Rain by Daniel Berkman

Come Rain (2005) and Dust Collective (2006) were written for San Francisco based choreographer Heidi Schweiker.
These works marked the beginning of my career as a serious modern dance composer and the level of depth reached in these works were way beyond anything I'd composed before.
For starters, the instrumentation was solely symbolic and so I had to use technological tools to extrapolate the music from these objects.
In Come Rain, for instance, I wanted to use my old Lark phonograph for it's atmospheric texture but also as an instrument.
The needle on the shellac is heard throughout the piece and during more rhythmic sections, I simulate a "scratching effect". Antique turntablism!

The next four tracks are bonus tracks, soundscapes from my explorations with Metasynth. I used it to create the granular synthesis effects on voices and instruments that became the overall sound of Come Rain. The Old Spin was an earlier draft which became a dance remix track, bringing together a funk beat with a scratching phonograph and mellotrons. Prog house.

In Dust Collective, I sampled my grandmother's antique brass bowls by striking them, bowing them, making them sing, etc.
I also used the Roland Jupiter 8 through most of it, a lot of times imitating the brass bowls creating a cacophony of metallic resonance.
The theme here is found somewhere in the past or in the present where the past has wreaked havoc on the objects of the present. Decay, entropy, time, and the subtle allusion of dust to the body.
My (then) 30 year old Jupiter 8 would often spew out unintended noises and fuzzy crackles that added nuance and feeling to the music. The joy of imperfection became the quest, the quest for an analog sound bath.
These two pieces continue to be bench marks in all that I do in music. They are living examples of my singular voice in the field and a chronicle of my past life and work.

Daniel Berkman 2019

Daniel Berkman is a Bay Area electronic musician, composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, looper and innovator of the Kora (a 21-stringed harp-lute from West Africa) and it's modern counterpart, the Gravikord.
Daniel composes for dance, film, instrumental, vocal and also has recordings under his electronic music moniker Colfax.

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