Songs for Glass Island
Experimental Music Unit and Camille Norment
Redshift Records TK569 (redshiftmusicsociety.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-glass-island)
Songs for Glass Island unfolds as a continuous 50-minute soundscape divided into ten songs although the work behaves like a single evolving organism in two parts. Its conceptual spark comes from Robert Smithson’s unrealized 1969 land-art proposal to encrust Miami Islet in the Salish Sea with 100 tons of tinted glass, a project eventually abandoned due to public opposition. Rather than illustrating the idea, the artists imagine the acoustic life of such a place: the resonances and spectral ecologies that might arise from a glass-covered island.
Created by Camille Norment with Experimental Music Unit members Tina Pearson, George Tzanetakis and Paul Walde, the album immerses the listener in the raw, elemental acoustics of glass—shattered, bowed, blown, rubbed and coaxed into states that feel both organic and otherworldly.
Part I opens with a burst of shattering textures that gradually dissolve into long, breath-infused tones. Low, whale-like undulations emerge for an extended sequence, with higher gestures appearing as counterpoint. The soundscape then shifts into bell-like and whistling tones in close harmonic clusters before giving way to rougher grating timbres. Part II enters in stark contrast, with spacious, resonant bell-like tones. Gradually, short articulations gather in layers over a low-register drone, bringing this glass-born world to a close.
Throughout, the absence of electronic processing heightens the music’s intensity. Songs for Glass Island is a rare achievement, an acoustic world of glass rendered with breathtaking imagination and precision.
