I was in the house and noticed a new, strange sound coming from the back yard. It sounded like a cicada, but more metallic. I picked up my digital recorder and went to check it out. It was our neighbor, Josh, in his shed working with a  rotary blade sharpener. It reminded me of a circular saw, but was scraping at a lawnmower blade rather than cutting through wood. I got Josh’s attention and asked him if I could record the sound for a music project. He said “Certainly!!” with such enthusiasm and good humor that I was taken aback.

It is a distinctive sound that is mildly caustic and unpleasant. Could definitely use it for the Broken World. I want to have a collection of more-or-less atonal sounds for that one, almost like a flower arrangement of them — some more spare and some more thick. This particular sound is “thick”, with a lot of harmonics, and a repeating rhythmic structure. It did have a recognizable pitch buried in the noise.

To extend the metaphor — not so much a “flower arrangement” as one of those dried arrangements that my mother-in-law used to make, with the bulky bulgy milkweed pods, spiky teazel, cylindrical cattails, and the airy skeletal remains of flowers such as baby’s breath, chamomile and asters. Dry, crunchy, stiff, unbending, fragile, and relatively monochromatic.