Sam Dunscombe's second album, Two Forests / Oceanic, uses field recordings and rational tuning practice to reimagine the music used for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy sessions.
"Two Forests" begins in a central Californian sequoia grove. Bird songs and buzzing insect life are treated with a variety of time-based processing methods (slicing and recombination, primitive granular synthesis, delay, and so on), which strip the field recordings of their linear, documentary character, reframing them in an enchanted web of traces and echoes. Analyzing the pitches found in the original recordings, Dunscombe used them to generate a large Just Intonation pitch set. These tones are woven slowly into the field recordings, gradually building in density and complexity until the forest has been transformed into an unreal space of infinite proportions.
On "Oceanic," several recordings of different beaches fade in and out to create a texture both homogenous and constantly shifting in both the rhythm of the waves and each recording's sense of depth and distance. Tones relating in simple ratios to the average rhythm of each beach float over each other, coloring the white noise texture of the field recordings with shifting hues. In both pieces, Dunscombe forgoes the easy consonance that bogs down much contemporary ambient music for a richer harmonic array informed by extended tuning practices and spectralism. The end results suggest a hitherto undreamt-of meeting of Radulescu's undulating sonic masses and the discreetly processed location recordings of Irv Teibel's "psychologically ultimate" environments.
Looking beyond the insularity that can afflict experimental music culture, Dunscombe's work is a moving argument for the healing power of expanded approaches to sound and music. Even outside of a psychedelics-assisted therapy, frequent immersion in Two Forests / Oceanic is almost guaranteed to produce beneficial psychological results.
Sam Dunscombe is a performer, composer, sound artist, and audio engineer. She is interested in the multi-dimensional perception of time, which has led to explorations in spectralism, just-intonation, improvisation, the performance of complex-notated repertoire, field recording, audio engineering, and live electronic performance.
Sam Dunscombe is a member of several musical groups, including Berlin's Harmonic Space Orchestra, the Australian performer-composer trio Golden Fur (together with
James Rushford and
Judith Hamann),
Oren Ambarchi's Carpe Diem, and duo projects with Michiko Ogawa, Rebecca Lane,
Julia Reidy, and others. She has records available on Mode Records,
Black Truffle, Another Timbre, Wandelweiser, and others.
Sam Dunscombe was awarded a Doctor of Musical Arts from UC San Diego in 2018, with a thesis exploring the clarinet works of French-Romanian composer Horatiu Radulescu. She now works as the archivist to his estate.
