The Roving Musicologist

Atheist Church Bells (Prague)

   The park on the hill is the best place to listen to the bells of the many churches of Prague.  The Czech republic is also the most atheistic nation on Earth, so there’s no need to feel like it means anything else besides a sound.

While few keys are required to move around Prague, the Door to the House of God is often Locked.

Travel Post #27: High Pitched Sunrise Temple Chant (Mangalore, India)

The only thing open was this temple and a newspaper stand.

There were only a few pools of light in the streets when I was dropped off by the night bus.  The few desperate rickshaw drivers waiting by the bus refused to give me any directions so I walked around looking for a place to get coffee, but nothing was open.  Then I heard this chant coming from somewhere, and followed it to a place called temple square.

I spent some time sitting with an old man selling leaves that had some religious purpose while the motorbikes and trucks began breaking the silence.  He was trying to sing along to the chant.

More people began to gather around the temple as the sun came up.  I moved next to the bodhi tree and watched a woman circling around the tree repeatedly.

The chant ended and the sun was up.  People were awake.  The shopkeeper across the street insisted I take his picture.

At the time, I didn’t know why.

Mangalore is unaccustomed to tourists.  The guidebooks barely mention it and no one stays any longer than they have to, usually.

As I walked around the next day, a man stopped on his motorbike and said he had seen me praying at their temple.  I was only standing there while the sound recorder was on, but this was prayer in the eyes of this man.  He was curious to ask all of the usual questions, and then he left.

Then I went to the mall.

Travel Post #22: Funeral Music and Hello Ambushes (Kampot, Cambodia)

No Laughing Zone

Joseph Conrad was right, heat warps your mind.  You can’t walk anywhere, any destination becomes a trudge.  Even the novice monks at the temples seem out of sorts.  Although the worst thing you could do is get married in this state of mind, weddings are a constant.  Funerals, coming along on their own, feature repetitive rolling tones blasted out of a PA system that looks like something from an elementary school.

This recording is the result of a day of walking around in the sun in Kampot.  One part of the recording is funeral music that was being played out of a PA system down a dirt road.  The other part is the music produced in an unattended school of music, abandoned in anticipation of the Khmer New Year and full of nothing but percussion and wooden swords.

Travel Post #21: Call to Prayer Echoed (Alanya, Turkey)

Triple reverberations of Islamic Prayer fill the valley next to the sea where Alanya sits.  The Mosques in most of Turkey are very close together so it is easy to record several calls to prayer at once, although this spot in Alanya had better acoustics than any other spot I found.  The scraping in the track is from the tools of construction workers that were digging drainage ditches in the courtyard. 

Travel Post #19: Angkor Wat Echo Chamber

If you hit yourself on the chest while against the wall in this chamber you will turn into a Buddhist Gong.  Towards the end of this track I tried to make the sound through other methods.  It didn’t work.  Strangely enough, my first two recordings of this chamber refuse to play.  If you look for this chamber at Angkor Wat, it is located in the northwest doorway that looks out onto the library.  Stand against any wall and beat yourself severely.  Then tap your chest lightly and listen for the sound.

The Chinese Buses arrive at 8am so come early to avoid a line.

Travel Post #14: Radio Chant Outside the Ashram (Pune, India)

The Small Machine made the noise, drawing power from the socket.