Ode to Dolphins:

A Jam Between an electric guitarist and at least 300 Pacific white-sided dolphins.

This recording was made through an underwater sound system in Queen Charlotte Strait off the northern tip of Vancouver Island in September 2001. Our boat , the Shelmar skippered by Bob Wood, was surrounded by this vast herd of dolphins for four days. Some days there were so many of them jumping all the way to the horizon, that we felt this is what it must have been like to see herds of buffalo on the Great Plains in the 19th century. Everything you hear was recorded during these sessions, with nothing overdubbed in the studio. The piece has been edited however, but only to balance the volume, EQs, and has been whittled down to seven minutes from over four hours of field recordings. The MP3 format necessarily compromises the high frequencies in this mix, but otherwise, we're happy with this version. we hope to have an entire CD of this material available through Interspecies by mid-2002.

Through the juxtaposition of edited segments, I have attempted to give examples of all the different kinds of acoustic relationships that occurred during the recording session. this includes parts of only water sounds, parts where only dolphins whistle, where only dolphins echolocate, where the dolphins vocalize without interacting with the guitar, and where they clearly modify both their whistles and their echolocations to reflect the improvizational guitar playing. The basic melody you hear is vaguely influenced by Irish music. Especially notice the segments where the guitar notes are bent, prompting the dolphins to modulate their "creaky door sounds" until they create a response like rubber bands stretching in a roadrunner cartoon.

You need a Realaudio plug-in to hear this streaming audio MP3. For those with a slow internet connection, be aware that Ithe 7 minute long audio stream needs a buffer to play smoothly, and may take a few minutes to download enough material to start. To hear it, just click play.