andre mount soundblog

As I mentioned on the photoblog, we had a baby. Her name is Juniper and she was born on June 26, 2017. She showed up more than a month in advance so they shipped us out of the Potsdam hospital to go to Burlington instead. Sarah took a whirlwind ride in an ambulance, Otis and I followed in the car at a more reasonable pace. We took the ferry from Plattsburgh and got out to stretch our legs. (WARNING: If you listen to this with headphones with the volume turned up, watch out for Otis shouting at the end!)

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Otis has a book of Nursery Rhymes. (This one.) He loves it, I think it’s just OK. Some of the poems are slightly different from the versions I grew up with (“washed poor Itsy out” instead of “washed the spider out”) and I’m always torn between singing what sounds right and what’s on the page. I also think the illustrations are a little too precious. But Otis likes it and we sing through the whole book together at bedtime some nights! It took a little coaxing to get him to sing on his own, but here he is singing “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” He’s a little cautious the first time around. But he had it all figured out the second night and sang with great confidence.

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Here’s the email warning I received:

Helicopters landing on SUNY Potsdam campus on April 14 & 17

SUNY Potsdam would like to alert the campus community of an upcoming Reserve Officers’ Training Corps exercise that may draw your attention.

At 9 a.m. on Thursday, April 14, three Chinook helicopters will land on the athletic fields across from Knowles Hall, as part of an ROTC training exercise.

Please do not be alarmed by this exercise.

The military helicopters will sit on display for the public to view from 9 to 10 a.m., and then will be used for training from 10 to 11 a.m.

If you wish to view the helicopters, for your own safety, please take all precautions and comply with University Police instructions when approaching the landing site.

ROTC students will board the helicopters to depart for Vermont at 11 a.m., where they will complete additional training over the weekend.

The campus community will once again see and hear the helicopters on Sunday, April 17, around 1:30 p.m., when the ROTC students are dropped off following their training.

SUNY Potsdam University Police, Physical Plant, Environmental Health & Safety and Athletics have assisted with preparing the field for landings.

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My friend Ed is a bit of an organologist and one day, while we were both still students at UCSB, he cranked up the old Aeolian player organ in Geiringer Hall and threw in a roll. Ed was planning on giving a talk (or something) about the organ and needed thirty or seconds of a recording to play for the audience. Enter Andre with his crappy camera mic.

Here’s what we heard…

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Pops performed Steve Reich’s Piano Phase with Gene Baker in the third installment of the Bakery Concert Series. It was great! We prepped Otis all morning, telling him the details of Western concert music attendance protocol and he was an excellent member of the audience. He started getting a little antsy toward the end, so we absconded to the back room. Here he is whispering some kind of toddler incantation while Pops plays some minimalist piano music in the background.

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Recorded from the porch of our old digs in West Stockholm.

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When we lived in West Stockholm, our landlord took a pretty hands-off approach to getting things fixed around the house. (After all, our three-bedroom apartment was only $550/mo.) At one point, the water pump started malfunctioning. Then it wouldn’t stop malfunctioning. It would ka-chunk into action, spin its motor, ka-chunk out of action, and make a sound like a toilet tank filling up. This would continue for long periods of time and, to our delight, was audible throughout the house.  (This was especially fun at night.) Now, four years later, I get muscle spasms listening to this recording. Enjoy!

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The sound of several audible crosswalk signals at this intersection in Melbourne, Australia is not unlike that of a marina full of boats at night. The echo-y polyrhythms sound, to me, just like a bunch of halyards slapping against masts as the boats get hit by passing wakes at different times and intensities. (Not Dad’s boat, of course. He always had the courtesy to secure his halyards with a bungee hooked to the shrouds.

(I was curious, so I looked it up. Accessible Pedestrian Signals have been in Australia since the 1980s.)

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One of the gifts we brought the the White Elephant at Mt. Macco last Christmas was a little thumb piano I found on Amazon. I can’t remember if it went with Grandma CC or Grandpa Larry, but it ended up in Manchester. On a recent visit, Otis and I snuck upstairs at one point for a little recording session.

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On shitty days, we often find ourselves driving to the big city… Watertown, NY. (I’m being ironic, but they do have a Chipotle, a selection of thrift stores, and an indoor playground.) One of Otis’s favorite pastimes on these trips is to go to the Salmon Run Mall and look at (and run around and shout at) a kinetic ball sculpture by George Rhoads: Perpetuball Motion Machine No. 1. When I was a kid, I used to beg my parents to take me to Port Authority to see Rhoads’s 42nd Street Ballroom so I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

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