T Putnam Hill is a writer, editor, and electroacoustic musician based in Austin, Texas. His compositions and improvisations frequently utilize guitar, field recordings and feedback loops to create sonic narratives that unfold through the interplay between chaotic systems and the artist’s attempt to mold that chaos into structure.
In “Resonant Lung I: For Two Guitars and Organ,” T Putnam Hill releases two guitars to their own devices, to sit passively in open tunings, waiting for external sound waves to excite their strings into action. The MIDI-controlled instruments of The Resonant Lung cycle through progressions of chords and melodies nudged into quasi-random sequences. With time, the low frequencies emitted by the Lung begin to vibrate the sympathetically tuned strings on the guitars. The guitar signals, mediated by a simple chain of effects, intermingle with each other until the combination of shifting tones becomes a unified pulsing drone that evolves with only minimal intervention by the artist. (Addendum: The artist might decide to pick up a guitar and strum and/or pluck its strings, thus negating the previous statement about minimal intervention.)
See and hear the performance of T Putnam Hill on Sunday July 22nd within The Resonant Lung at 2pm.