R Keenan Lawler
Bow Shock [excerpt]
A “bow shock” is a shock wave created by an object moving at supersonic speed through a medium. I’m reminded of the sonic booms produced by military aircraft breaking the sound barrier back in the seventies in my hometown of Munfordville, Kentucky. The sound, descending to the ground, shaking every building, resonated throughout the perceptible distance. This was, without question, my first encounter with the visceral power of sound and its ability to cause absolute fear and exhilaration at the same time. My father’s penchant for playing bagpipe LPs at top volume made another early impression on me. This time however, my ears connected to the purity of the drone and the tones set against it, in perfect harmony unlike anything I had heard before. I heard it again in the tamboura and sympathetic strings of Indian classical music. Years earlier, while discovering the process of “flanging” multiple tape decks, I recognized what I would come to know as the Harmonic Series. I had experienced an epiphany. A significant event. That fascination stayed with me throughout my musical life, surfacing again in the late eighties while discovering the music of Elliott Sharp, Rhys Chatham, John Coltrane, and Tony Conrad. I heard it in music from all over the world that I was absorbing: the Delta blues, the overtone chanting of Tibetan monks, the chiming pure-toned rhythms of Balinese gamelan, and the harp music of West Africa. These encounters led me to explore the possibilities of resonator guitar. I began to see how the Harmonic Series, at the core of microtonality, was a defining characteristic that connected all of the music to which I had been drawn. I learned how the emerging music of the Western world had compromised the beauty and purity of the Series in favor of equal temperament, cultural imperialism disguised as a system of convenience. In my own experience the Harmonic Series is something impossibly ancient and elemental, yet completely alive in the present moment. As I write this I can hear it outside as an approaching train speeds past my window and as the cool night air is pulsating with a swarm of insects making their own cosmic music.
R Keenan Lawler — bowed resonator guitar
2009 with many thanks to Cindy