Flow Regimes

Four water years of interior British Columbia, one drum voice each

Interior British Columbia’s rivers do not run the same year twice. Sorting 42 water years (1981 to 2022) by when the spring freshet comes, how big it is, how low the late summer gets and how much snow there was gives four kinds of year, with no sharp edges between them. This piece takes one typical year from each kind (a dry one, a near-normal one, a late, big, wet one and an early one with a dry summer) and gives it a drum voice. Each voice reads its own year’s river, week by week, and the four enter one at a time, so you hear the same October-to-September cycle four ways over each other. Snowpack dulls and opens the filter, snowmelt wakes a harp (a marimba doubles it from the fourth pass), and warmth turns the mode.

It is an evocation of a style (odd-length cycles of 9, 7, 5 and 3 steps against a steady 4/4, swing, human timing, a slow filter as form), built from a description of the idiom. No melody, sample or voice comes from any record. The card lists what is mapped, what is not and what to be careful about, including that the lead does not appear until four minutes in.