Coyote Oldman - Under An Ancient Sky
new
release date: Tue Mar 25 2008
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Track Listing
- New Worlds
- Timeless
- Home World
- Between the Colors
- Under an Ancient Sky
- Translucent Shadows
- Luminescence
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Under An Ancient Sky is the 12th release from Coyote Oldman. Named after the trickster Oldman Coyote of Native American mythology, Coyote Oldman mixes technology, music and culture in a unique, timeless blend. Flutists Michael Graham Allen and Barry Stramp combine their experience with the flute's history in the cultures of the world with a modern outlook and studio approach that gives their albums an innovative depth.
"The Under An Ancient Sky recording is part of a project that I started a few years ago involving the reintroduction of an extinct flute. The only flute used in the recording is a reconstruction of a 1200 year old Anasazi flute recovered in a dig in Arizona back in the 1930's. The flute is true to the ancient scale and all the music on the new CD was composed and performed on the ancient design. The Anasazi flute has been extinct for 700 years."--Michael Graham Allen
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Coyote Oldman - House Made of Dawn
release date: Tue Aug 17 1999
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Track Listing
- Into the Vast
- Strength
- Light And Mist
- House Made Of Dawn
- Luminous Expanse
- Sweet Morning
- Dawn World
- Standing On Earth
- Walk In My World
- Restoration
- Swim In Light
- Rise
- Abundance
- In Warm Velvet Darkness
- Returning Always
- Emergence
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Coyote Oldman are MICHAEL GRAHAM ALLEN and BARRY STRAMP. Their subtle, creative approach to the Native American flute has inspired a host of imitators, but no one has matched their inspired studio transformation of these archaic instruments of wood and breath into the ecstatic realm of ethereal sonics. House Made of Dawn achieves a seamless equilibrium between man and nature, earth and sky, sound and space.
STEPHEN HILL
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"There really is not adequate terminology to describe what we, as Coyote Oldman, do with sound or how we create music.
It all began by the accidental use of experimental technology to extend the natural melodic scales of ancient wooden flutes within a morphing virtual acoustic environment. These aurally immersive worlds we continue to explore are unbounded by physical reality and have been likened to synesthesia: seeing sounds, hearing colors. One small boy termed it "the sound of God singing." Another said "I've heard this music before, it's what I hear when I'm dreaming."
Since Michael and I began the synergistic collaboration known as Coyote Oldman in 1985, the hallmark of our sound has been the interactive combination of lyrical primitive flute and sound manipulation improvisations. Though we have often branched out from this core over our previous nine releases, it is the leading voice on this recording. Astride this unique artistic and scientific vehicle, we humbly continue our search for musical truth and beauty across the borders of time and space.
House Made of Dawn was recorded over a two year period spanning 1997 to 1999. Michael developed the concept and the exquisite primary melodic motifs that propel this project. He constructed instruments in new modal scales, designed specifically for the recording. I performed prototypical music experiments and researched new chaos-driven sound manipulation techniques in my audio laboratory. We joined forces in the studio for intensive bursts of composing, recording and mixing.
I see our process of creating this music as one of discovering sounds that are already there, given the appropriate conditions for them to exist. We grow music in a garden of pulsating air molecules and electrons, planted by breath and dancing neurons, tended by our thoughts and emotions, fed by the light of the past and the promise of the future. House Made of Dawn is a metaphor for the process by which it was made, for personal discovery and for the possibilities that await humanity in the new millennium."
BARRY STRAMP 1999
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"A part of us exists hidden in warm velvet darkness, a pale fluid brightness like a tear of the moon: our connection to the great mystery. As your own personal dawn approaches, your soul, in soft luminescence, enters your waking world like a house made of dawn.
And in my heart, I feel that we humans are at a beginning. Our civilization is just stepping toward the light, holding something vastly precious: a future.
And the light is just touching the horizon.
I wish to express gratitude to the many people who have expanded our knowledge of this life, this world, and this cosmos: those who have the playfulness to ask the right questions and the courage to accept new answers."
MICHAEL GRAHAM ALLEN 1999
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Coyote Oldman open a gateway into a timeless world of sound with the first breath into their flutes. Between that first breath and the last exhalation, Michael Graham Allen and Barry Stramp (who comprise Coyote Oldman) pull down a sound that could have come from some mythical gathering in a prehistoric kiva, or a cyberspace meeting 20 minutes into the future.
Their name comes from Oldman Coyote, the trickster and sometimes fool of Native American mythology. It was the name of Allen's flute company and it hung on, even though none of those characteristics would apply to Coyote Oldman. But Allen and Stramp do play Native flutes, as well as Incan pan-pipes and ocarinas and they use Native American iconography to give their music some kind of metaphorical-spiritual grounding.
Despite these Native cultural connections, Allen and Stramp make no glorification of their fractional Native ancestry. Instead, Coyote Oldman operates from a core sound in which many cultures are embodied. As much as they are playing Native music, you could also say they're playing Medieval hymns, 20th century space music or Tibetan chants. Coyote Oldman draws intrinsic links with other cultures, evoking, but not playing, the shakuhachi flute of Japan and the bansuri flute of India.
Alabama-born Michael Graham Allen met Oklahoma-bred Barry Stramp in 1981 at an Oklahoma City crafts fair. Allen was there selling his hand-made Native flutes. At the time renowned Native flutist R. Carlos Nakai hadn't yet ignited the Native flute boom, and they were still a curiosity bordering on oblivion.
Allen is the founder, principal flutist and composer of the group. He is also the craftsman and earth voice of the duo. He researches the history of his instruments, tracking down flutes from many countries, but especially Native cultures of the western hemisphere. On this album you can hear flutes that Allen may have made a few days before the recording and clay ocarinas that might date back hundreds of years.
Barry Stramp is the modernist of the group. Classically trained in concert flute and composition, he also studied engineering and physics. That means he can drop references to Pierre Boulez and IRCAM as well as DSP and FFT processing into a conversation that started about live performance. It's Stramp's skill at studio manipulation that turns the raw material of Allen's flutes into the expansive soundscapes that are Coyote Oldman. They work together, manipulating the sound in real time, feeding back off the echoes, reverb, and harmonization as if creating a superflute.
There is a remarkable synergy between these musicians. They mix technologies, create hybrid flutes which sing like enormous train-whistles, creating Doppler effects through metallic tamboura-like drones, mysterious percussion and disembodied voices. It seems like no less than the sound of the universe opening up before you. Coyote Oldman are surfing the winds of a timeless sound.
JOHN DILIBERTO
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Coyote Oldman - In Beauty I Walk
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Track Listing
- Ancient Light 3:35 (RA)
- Night Forest 7:58 (RA)
- People of the Glacier 9:00 (RA)
- Rolling Earth 3:17 (RA)
- Iron Wood 6:02 (RA)
- Tear of the Moon 9:56
- Dawn Procession 4:28
- Lunar Symphony 6:30
- Compassion 5:20
- Thunder Chord 5:26
- The Shape of Time 8:38
- A Splendid Sky 2:36
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- Since 1986 COYOTE OLDMAN have evolved a powerful fusion of ancient wind instruments and creative sound design, and sold well over half a million records, setting the standard for the Native flute genre. HereÕs the very best of this ground-breaking group's first seven albums. The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen once said that concepts of beginnings and endings in music were artificial. "To present a work of art with a particular beginning and end is only an illusion," he proclaimed. "It is one proposition of an excerpt of time, the timeless time."
Coyote Oldman lives in this time. With the first breath into their flutes, they open a gateway into this timeless world of sound. Between that first breath and the last exhalation, Coyote Oldman pulls down a sound that could have come from some mythical gathering in a prehistoric kiva, or a cyberspace meeting 20 minutes into the future.
The navigation chart for Coyote Oldman's odyssey can be found on the title track of their first album, Night Forest. It opens with a simple solo flute calling out across a canyon of digital echo. For 95% of the Native flute albums out there, that's as far as the trip goes. For Coyote Oldman's MICHAEL GRAHAM ALLEN and BARRY STRAMP it's just the beginning, as the piece evolves into a serpentine melody, joined by one, then another flute weaving ghost echoes and sympathetic resonances.
Their name comes from Oldman Coyote, the trickster and sometimes fool of Native American mythology. It was the name of Allen's flute company and it hung on, even though none of those characteristics would apply to Coyote Oldman. But Allen and Stramp do play Native flutes, as well as Incan pan-pipes and ocarinas and they use Native American iconography to give their music some kind of metaphorical-spiritual grounding.
Despite these Native cultural connections, Allen and Stramp make no glorification of their fractional Native ancestry. Instead, Coyote Oldman operates from a core sound in which many cultures are embodied. As much as they are playing Native music, you could also say they're playing Medieval hymns, 20th century space music or Tibetan chants. Coyote Oldman draws intrinsic links with other cultures, evoking, but not playing, the shakuhachi flute of Japan and the bansuri flute of India. On "Lunar Symphony" they sound like a cathedral pipe organ, with unimaginably low flutes booming out a rolling pedal tone.
Alabama-born Michael Graham Allen met Oklahoma-bred Barry Stramp in 1981 at an Oklahoma City crafts fair. Allen was there selling his hand-made Native flutes. At the time renowned Native flutist R. Carlos Nakai hadn't yet ignited the Native flute boom, and they were still a curiosity bordering on oblivion.
Allen is the founder, principal flutist and composer of the group. He is also the craftsman and earth voice of the duo. He researches the history of his instruments, tracking down flutes from many countries, but especially Native cultures of the western hemisphere. On this album you can hear flutes that Allen may have made a few days before the recording and clay ocarinas that might date back hundreds of years.
Barry Stramp is the modernist of the group. Classically trained in concert flute and composition, he also studied engineering and physics. That means he can drop references to Pierre Boulez and IRCAM as well as DSP and FFT processing into a conversation that started about live performance. It's Stramp's skill at studio manipulation that turns the raw material of Allen's flutes into the expansive soundscapes that are Coyote Oldman. They work together, manipulating the sound in real time, feeding back off the echoes, reverb, and harmonization as if creating a superflute. On pieces like "Ancient Light," they use these studio transformations to create traceries in the air as the high flutes descend through the atmosphere.
There is a remarkable synergy between these musicians. As soon as Allen would hear one of Stramp's manipulations, like his pan-pipes pitched down a few octaves, he'd go home and invent an instrument that would give him the same effect acoustically. One of these inventions, the C# Bass Flute, looks like the overgrown child of a bassoon and a Native flute.
For Coyote Oldman nothing is pure, but everything is purity. They mix technologies, create hybrid flutes and even bring in other instruments like Stramp's Chapman Stick on "Iron Wood," and MICHAEL FITZSIMMONS's percussion on "Dawn Procession." On "Compassion," the mournful soprano of singer HUI CHENG of the Chinese National Opera is etched across Coyote Oldman's solemn bass flutes.
For the most part, however, they stay, in Allen's words, "in our own backyard." You can hear Stramp playing shakuhachi and bansuri flutes on his solo album A Sky of Dreams as well as on Invisible Rhythm with his group, Satori. But in Coyote Oldman, it's strictly wind instruments from the New World.
"The Shape of Time," the most recent track on In Beauty I Walk, points to new directions for Coyote Oldman. Flutes sing like enormous train-whistles, creating Doppler effects through metallic tamboura-like drones, mysterious percussion and disembodied voices. It seems like no less than the sound of the universe opening up before you. For Coyote Oldman, that really isn't such a new direction after all. They are, as Stockhausen suggests, surfing the winds of a timeless sound.
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Coyote Oldman - Thunder Chord
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Track Listing
- Ascent 5:01
- Thunder Chord 5:25
- Turtle Island 6:19
- Medicine Flute 4:15
- Planting 3:15
- Field of Clouds 10:33
- Wind Shadows 2:58
- Shining Prairie 4:15
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- Thunder Chord presents COYOTE OLDMAN's most developed music in a continuum mixing flutes and their reverberating timetrails into new harmonies, transporting listeners to a deeper world. Like most authentic spacemusic, it "weaves a gentle spell of calm and profound peacefulness." "COYOTE OLDMAN's music echoes across the plains like a haunted memory carried on the winds of the past."
-John Diliberto, CD Review writer and producer of Echoes (NPR national music service)
A chance meeting over a handmade wooden flute at an Oklahoma crafts fair, the discovery of a shared interest in indigenous music of the Americas, and a perfectly complementary working relationship gave birth to the cohesive identity of Coyote Oldman.
Though they employ native American instruments and iconography in their recordings, both members of the Coyote Oldman team have only fractional American Indian ancestry. Nor are they traditional ethnic romanticists. In fact, behind the effortless sounding surface of their music you'll find a pair of dedicated, relentless, unorthodox experimentalists.
Maybe just living on the rolling prairies of the American heartland opens the ear to the subtle harmonies, the soothing continuities, and the dramatic spaces of this music.
Like most authentic spacemusic, you can hear this album on several levels. As a quiet background it "weaves a gentle spell of calm and profound peacefulness." Sit down and listen on earphones or loud enough to fill up your room, and you're only a neuro-shift away from serious time and space travel. Somewhere in between, it's "haunting," "ethereal," "mysterious."
We don't have the right language for this yet, but every reviewer attempts to pin down the mysterious aura, the atmosphere Coyote Oldman creates a virtual environment so seamless that it takes the most determined analytical effort to focus on the individual components of the sound, only to be pulled back immediately into the larger image.
BARRY STRAMP and MICHAEL GRAHAM ALLEN have recognized that to carry an ancient sound back to the present you have to master the contemporary vehicle. With cool passion and without romanticizing its source material, Thunder Chord presents their most developed music and most sophisticated sound, in a continuum extending from the distant keening of a single flute to the massive thunderwaves of a ten foot sheet of pure titanium. These sonic alchemists mix flutes and their reverberating timetrails into new harmonies, transporting listeners to a deeper world, singing a pure and timeless emotional language elegantly enveloped in a 3-D digital ambiance.
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