Meet the artist using Colorado's secret sounds to make electronic music
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FRUITA, Colo. — Kyle Harvey, with headphones and a bag of microphones and recording equipment, is always listening for interesting sounds to use in his electronic music.
Harvey is a musician, poet, photographer and writer. He writes and performs traditional singer/songwriter tunes, and also makes ambient, electronic music under the stage name When Light.
Harvey, 45, has always loved mundane sounds, and their potential when paired with analog tape and guitar pedals. In his home studio — a humble room crammed full of esoteric audio equipment and decorated with prints of his film photography — he picked up a cassette tape with “windshield wipers” written on it.
“What's cool about the cassette is you can slow it down, you can speed it up, so it just gives you kind of textural possibilities that are very tactile,” said Harvey.
He recorded the windshield wipers on his phone, played them out through a delay pedal and recorded that sound on to the tape. The result? An echo-y, percussive track that could be used to build tension in the score of a horror movie.
Video: Joshua Vorse, Rocky Mountain PBS
These sounds of life are stretched and pulled and their speed is varied until they’re just right and fit into his electronic compositions. The sounds come from a friend’s backyard, or the living cryptobiotic soil at the end of an hours-long hike.
To gather these field recordings, Harvey uses special equipment such as contact microphones and hydrophones (for underwater recording).
“I've become obsessed with listening to things that you might not otherwise hear,” he said.
Harvey shared those secret sounds at a performance in Orbit Artspace, an art gallery in Fruita, last month. The improvisational sound collage, as he described it, was a good fit for a gallery, where people would be willing to listen intently to the soundscapes for a few hours.
“It's his relationship with the sounds of the earth and the rhythm of his own musicality, in a way, he establishes a connection, a very personal connection, and expresses it through this medium,” said Andrew Wheeler from Fruita, who attended the performance.
Making that connection to sound is just as important to Harvey as eventually composing the music. The meditative process of finding a spot that might have interesting auditory qualities and setting up the recording is an art itself.
“I like the process of hiking for three hours and finding a little batch of twisted moss and putting a microphone in there and putting the headphones on, sometimes I don't press record, I just listen and see what's going on,” he said.
“And if I feel inspired to, then I press record. But it's the process, I find great joy in it.”
Even if no one listens to the tones, drones and oddly familiar natural sounds of his work, creating art for its own sake is worth it, Harvey said.
Listening to anything through headphones adds dimension and makes it more interesting, said Harvey.
“It can deepen your understanding of the world around you and your relationship to the world,” he said, “so in that regard it's kind of spiritual … or something.”
Type of story: News
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Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.