Wind chimes — Pluto, Twilight and Gypsy, in Teign Gorge

A candidate here for 'ULTIMATE Outlandish Chimes Ensemble' designation! — Outlandishly other-worldly!

If this is unbearable for you in its dissonance, please take heart that this is a particularly extreme example, requiring a lot of mental flexibility to appreciate, and all other chimes combinations that I'd upload here would not go this far in dissonance!

Here we have another weird trio, recorded on 10 May 2018 at my usual wind chimes recording spot, by Hunting Gate, at the highest point on the Hunter's Path, high up on the north side of the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK — as always, with a backdrop of the quiet rushing sound of the River Teign far below in the bottom of the valley.

Chimes used:

1. Davis Blanchard Pluto

2. David Blanchard Twilight

3. Music of the Spheres Gypsy Soprano

This was one of the fruits of my final recording in the Wind Chimes in the Wild project.

Perhaps perversely, I'm uploading my recordings in reverse chronological order — i.e., most recent first —, so the most 'advanced' sounds are tending to come earlier rather than later. Because of its challenging nature I chose to restrict this upload to the first 35' of the 93-minute full recording.

Weirdly, just as happened for the previous outlandish chimes ensemble trio recording (26 April 2018), early on we have a quite long episode in which the wind gets up and leads into a light shower, all sounding really dramatic — then again followed by a period of quiescence with just faint wisps of chimes sound before the wind and chimes return to 'business as (un)usual'.

Actually overall this recording has a rather rougher and wilder feel about it than that previous recording, because (a) the tuning mismatch between Twilight and Gypsy chimes is particularly marked, often causing a lot of shimmering 'beats' in the sound, which have an intriguing beauty but wouldn't please all ears, and (b) the wind was really not quite in the right direction this time, and the recording suffered from a lot of intrusive microphone wind noise, which took a lot of work to remove the worst of. Inevitably, then, I had to allow in more microphone wind noise than I wanted to, just cutting out its (many) more intrusive occurrences.

Nonetheless, this is a sound that is by turns thrilling and, during quiescence, hauntingly will-o'-the-wispish, suspended over the Teign Gorge soundscape with rushing of the River Teign far below and the spring birdsong coming and going all around.

Positioning is Twilight (L.), Gypsy (R. of centre), placed further back, and Pluto (R.). I wanted the Gypsy to be dead centre, but I was limited by the position of a suitable branch to hang it on.

General information about the Davis Blanchard chimes

General information about the Music of the Spheres and Woodstock chimes

Birds heard in full recording include Blue Tit, Chaffinch, Chiffchaff, Linnet, Mistle thrush, Blackbird, Carrion crow, Yellowhammer, Blackcap, Wren, Willow warbler.

Recording two Davis Blanchard chimes plus a large and small set of cheap bamboo chimes in an earlier session at the same spot (no photos for this session). The arrow points to the recorder, with its black furry windshield.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with three nested Windcut furry windshields (custom design), and it was placed on a Zipshot Mini tripod, in a position where it was tolerably sheltered from the wind.

Initial post-recording processing was to use Audacity to apply an EQ curve to compensate for muffling from the furry windshields.

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!