September 13–20, 2001

music picks|experimental

Tom Heasley/Jim Cole and Spectral Voices

Nobody said space music was the exclusive province of the synthesizer. Chuck van Zyl — host of WXPN’s Star’s End program and booking guy for The Gathering’s series of shows — hasn’t said it. So he’s starting this season’s series with ambient music’s oddest entities. Like Tom Heasley, whose processed throat singing and loop-based atmospherics on his debut Where the Earth Meets the Sky (Hypnos) is but one layer of the CD’s emotional dynamic. Heasley’s primary tool for improvisational prowess is his tuba. Rather than offer a series of oom-pah-pahs, Heasley’s mighty brass tones produce dark languid melodies — as slow and low as a Gamalean chant. Then there’s the vocal trio Jim Cole and Spectral Voices. Led by former Peace Corps volunteer Cole and inspired by his efforts at monasteries in Laos and Thailand, fellow harmonic overtone singers Sharen Baker and Alan Dow offer up layer upon layer of shaped simultaneously-intoned notes. The result — on Coalescence and Sky, two Spectral Spiral label CDs recorded live, with zero overdubbing in 120-foot-high water towers — is a unified steely hum, a hiss-filled prayer as provocatively ominous as seemingly sanctified. Put that in your sampler and smoke it.

—A.D. Amorosi

Sat., Sept. 15, 8 p.m., $20 ($10 for full-time students with ID), St. Mary’s Church at Hamilton Village, 3916 Locust Walk on the University of Pennsylvania campus, 610-734-1009.