This is an installation conceived to take place for a day or a few days as a feature of a music and art festival or other kind of celebration. The inspiration for this project comes out of the sonic atmosphere of a recording I did in 2009 for the ECM label, Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street.

For centuries, bells sounding from high places in a town or city have united the people around a common experience – sometimes festive, sometimes somber, sometimes purely informational. Perhaps they could be thought of as an early form of “background music.” Given our lifelong cinematic conditioning it’s no surprise that I had always thought that, if I had the opportunity to do something in the realm of “public sound,” I would make something that would spread a mood across a city (or a field, or a lake). I was given that opportunity in early September 2008 at the Punkt Festival of contemporary music in the lovely little town, Kristiansand, on the southern tip of Norway.

My music was being performed there also. Anyone who knows what I do on stage or in recordings knows that I love a kind of rich harmony that arises from Ravel or Gil Evans or Miles Davis. I wondered what it would sound like to extend the harmony of the bells in the Domkirche, in the center of town, into this colorful harmonic sphere, away from the unremarkable functionality of some ordinary melody followed by a tolling bell marking the hour. But I still wanted it to relate to the tradition of chiming the hour and to be simple, short and subtle. In other words, I wanted the passers-by on the square below or the people on the outskirts of town to perhaps pause for a few seconds and notice that something was different without knowing exactly what.

So, returning once again to the idea of “cinematic,” I made a “mood setting” for each hour from 8 in the morning until 10 at night, imagining that the morning bells would be bright and bracing, (“wake up, there’s some magic in the air!”) and thereafter, each hour changing gradually and going a little lower until the sensuality of the low gong-like sounds at night that I imagined could be warm, embracing and mysterious to someone lying in bed at some distance from the town square.

Of course, my own self-interest will color this statement, but everyone agreed that it was a beautiful experience to hear these sounds, floating out over the city and felt that it added a unique kind of unifying experience to the festival situation. A team of two (myself along with the technical director and software designer, Arnaud Mercier) could implement the bell compositions in a day or two after sufficient pre-planning. We welcome any inquiries about realizing a special version of what we call “Near-Far” utilizing the unique qualities of a church carillon in your festival city.