Douglas Henderson ::: (pages of illustrations)

A hyper-real portrait of gusts of wind through a tree. Using thousands of individual sounds recorded in the studio, every flutter, every slap, every brush of every leaf, the clatter of every bough and twig was has been meticulously assembled into a truer-than-life sound image, and then reanalyzed as a symphony. Looking at a tree I can see every leaf -- and in this piece I wanted to perform every leaf, to experience individually all the aspects of the tree. Focus, depth of field, the illuminated night sky and the city skyline behind a groomed birch, bluish and crisp as razors. I wanted to capture that whole impression and to deliver it. The song of a gust is as compelling as any sonata. However, even a sophisticated recording offers none of this -- the microphone generalizes all into an enigmatic hiss. For this project I wanted to return the mind’s limitless focus to the realm of artifice, and then back to a new, impossible reality. It is not only my dream of the tree, but also the tree’s dream of all of us .