HALF-DRAGGED by Henry Birdsey

HB - lap steel, metal objects

Charles Amirkhanian - Executive Producer
Andrew Weathers - Producer & Mastering Engineer
Jakob Battick - Liner Notes
Liam Herb - Bio & Tuning Notes
Kevin Gan Yuen - Artwork
Gretchen Korsmo - Layout

Recorded in Ripton, Vermont in February 2020

Excerpt from liner notes "WHERE THE VEIL BETWEEN HAS WORN THIN"

[...] I have never been exactly to Henry’s hometown of Ripton, Vermont, though as a fellow New Englander I am familiar with the surrounding area. Still, I am fairly certain that Half-Dragged sounds a lot like how those Green Mountain woods feel at night, looking up through the trees and staring into the limitless beyond, watching the light slowly twist and twirl over the valleys and recede into half-dissipated forms of perfect nothingness.

Running through all of this is the gliding specter of very old forms of American music, rural drone, and hypnotisms, self taught and invented musics. On Half-Dragged, Henry takes the lap steel guitar and tunes it microtonally, cleaving it out of the folk, country, and blues idioms its most readily identified with and throwing it into alien territory. The ethereality remains, ghosted vestiges of the most classic American sonic signifiers for ‘landscape’, the occasional resonant twang and the hum and buzz of metal slide on metal strings, but something else is conjured through this instrument-to-tonality inversion. The hypnotism and wide-open-ness of those earlier musics is still here, but a cosmic sublimity is forged into the potential of the instrument, one that is boundless and sweeps across the full spectrum of pitch. A ‘cosmic’ potential that is faithful to the true meaning of the word, capable of otherworldly gorgeousness and unsettling alienation within the same composition. Here, the landscape is sometimes scorched and ashen, other times glimmering through pitch-blackness. At moments you’d swear it’s terrifying, but then another cloud form comes along and the whole thing strikes you as strangely gorgeous. In this sense, it’s hallucinatory music, a half-remembered dream of being a child and peering out into the darkness and moonlight at the edge of camp, both horrified and transfixed by the presences beyond [...]

If you can, listen to it very loudly, and out in the woods.


—Jakob Battick | Berkeley, CA 8.15.20

TUNING & PRODUCTION NOTES 

Half-Dragged is an adaptation of a live set Birdsey performed on a California tour in early 2020. It tunes the lap steel into brilliantly sinister Just-intonation-based aural configuration. The tuning uses close dissonances between neighboring strings and competing 5th functions (perfect 5th between bass and tenor and tritone between bass and soprano) to create a rattling, ominous Dominant drag.

Birdsey then "retunes" the strings throughout the work to supplement this effect by creating further diminished sounding harmonies by retuning the strings, adding and subtracting a minor third and an additional tritone. The result of this process is an unresolved, sinking harmonic pull to nowhere.

The string tuning ratios are as follows:
String six: *1/1 (fundamental)
String five: 81/80 (raised fundamental) **—7/6 (narrow minor 3rd)
String four: 3/2 (perfect 5th)
String three: 14/9 (narrow minor 6)—10/7 (wide tritone)
String two: 7/4 (minor 7th)—3/1 (fundamental plus 2 octaves)
String one: 11/8 (narrow tritone)
*Fundamental=D2 at A4=432Hz
**— denotes retuning/fluctuating intervals

Using this tuning and two violin bows, and pieces of metal (used both as resonators on the strings and as preparations of the lap steel), Birdsey is able to excite harmonics on each of these strings, creating pure harmonic dissonance and consonances that “extend” and retune the instrument.

- Liam Herb


© 2020, Henry Birdsey
Other Minds Records | OM 2027

COMPOSER

pedal steel, lap steel, bagpipes, harmonicas

henrybirdsey.com