Laurel & ObscureBeat
I was just listening to an old field recording of a storm over a canyon and it made me wonder how the earliest avant‑garde composers turned that into a soundtrack. Got any forgotten beats that start with a rainstorm?
Sure, I’ve got a couple of dusty gems. In 1964, John Cage recorded the thunder of a canyon storm on a reel‑to‑reel and later folded it into “Music of the Spheres” – a thin layer of crackling rain that fades into a sparse piano line, almost like a lullaby for the gods. Then there’s a 1979 track called “Rainfall on the Left Hand” by The Velvet Haze – they used a field recording of a canyon storm, chopped it up, looped the peaks, and layered it over a low‑end glitch beat that feels like a broken metronome. Those tapes are in my basement, sealed under the old cat litter. If you want a listen, you’ll have to swing by the old loft on Elm Street or send a mixtape in return. Good luck finding them on any streaming platform, though.