Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi on Eigenharp Alpha

I’ve prepared a reinterpretation of Koyaanisqatsi for our San Francisco Eigenharp tour from May 5-10.

Koyaanisqatsi holds a special place in my heart, it’s one of those musical pieces that never leaves you, it stays deep inside you with all its beauty and nakedness, forever. My father introduced me to it when I was a little kid, it’s a real shame he passed away before I was able to play it for him myself. He would have loved it. Nonetheless, this is dedicated to him.

I think I managed to capture the essence of Koyaanisqatsi, let me know what you think of it.

I you like this performance, you can download the lossless audio file from SoundCloud for free.

For those interested in the technical parts:

Everything is played on the Eigenharp Alpha and recorded straight from the audio interface output without any mixing and just a little bit of mastering. I’m using the SonicCouture’s Glass / Works instrument in a four-part multi-timbral setup in Native Instruments Kontakt. Each key individually controls pitch, velocity and the resonance of the convolution filter cut-off frequency (which creates a faint scraping-like sound).

The vocals are done through the DPA microphone that’s clipped onto the breath pipe and plugged into the Eigenharp Alpha. It uses the built-in Eigenharp Alpha pre-amp and is routed through a series of Audio Unit effects in EigenD for pitch shifting, stereo spreading, EQ and compression. I’m monitoring directly from the headphone output of the Eigenharp Alpha with my Etymotic ER-4P earphones.

The single instrument cables carries all the information, data and audio, in both directions.