John Roach, Artist Ranger

Zion National Park sound artist in residence

John Roach wearing the uniform of a volunteer ranger, Zion National Park

Upper Emerald Pool

It’s early morning. Dawn has broken but it will be an hour or two before the sun peeks over the red sandstone cliffs and shines down onto the walls at the bottom of Zion National Park.  John Roach got up early to hike to Upper Emerald Pool. The day before, he noticed icicles dropping off the north face of the cliff. He got up early today to record the sounds.

John Roach

John Roach is a sound artist and has come to Zion to make recordings. He’s from New York City where he teaches sound art at Parsons School of Design/New School in Manhattan. He is the current artist in residence at the Park and has the whole month of February to record wind, water, echoes in closed canyons, birds, and interviews with people who have spent their lives articulating this place. Zion Park has been offering a few of these monthlong residencies each year since 2010. John is the first sound artist to be selected.

Icicles

Back at Emerald Pool, John has set up microphones and recording equipment. It is still fairly dark, but the light is changing. It’s nearing 9:00 when the sun begins to peak over, slowly moving across the rock face above the pool where icicles cling to the wall like a bank of organ pipes. As the walls start to warm,  the icicles start to lose their grip.  The sun continues its sweep as little icicles tinkle off to the ground. And then come bigger ones. As the sun continues to rise, an ice dam starts to break down. Then everything begins to let loose. To John, it sounds “like freight cars dropping off of a cliff.”  In the narrow canyon, the echo is dramatic. It starts slowly but soon ice is crashing everywhere.

And what are these sounds? John describes them as though they were instruments in an orchestra. “There’s the cracking which feels fairly delicate,” says John, “but in some cases ice hits ice which is one sound. In another case ice hits rock, and if it’s a big icicle hitting rock you’re really getting the resonance of the earth. And then in that point right in the middle of upper Emerald Pool where that stream of water is falling out of that crack it has built this kind of cone of ice below that’s just been gathering there, ice that’s been slowly  forming a pyramid. Occasionally one of them breaks off and that is like a really big milk shake being thrown against a wall. There’s this spluttering and splashing sound.”

As John continues his work, other hikers start arriving.  Seeing what John is doing, they take seats on rocks around the pools edge as though they’ve come to a concert. Whooping and hollering erupts when there is a particularly dramatic orchestral passage of falling ice. John has, unknowingly, invited the Zion visitors into his world of art. And the visitors have unexpectedly been privileged to a stunning winter performance.

Virgin Connection

A few days earlier John had come to my music studio in Virgin, just outside the Park, to interview me and record my banjo playing. We had a lively conversation about sound, music and the desert after which we decided to get together later in his residency. So, I was pleased when he invited Teresa and me to dinner. John’s wife Nancy had flown out from New York to spend a week and we were excited to be together as couples.  Also, one of the great things about this artist residency is that the artist is housed in an historic sandstone cottage at a particularly stunning location called the Grotto. We had seen the cottage many times from the road but had never been inside.

John Roach’s drawing of his residence in Zion Park.

The Grotto Tonosphere

The Cottage is simple but rustically appointed with an old knotty pine couch and chairs in the living room and a plain but well-appointed kitchen. John had turned the living room into his editing space where nine speakers lined the room, some hung, some on the floor. He even had a sub-woofer making the thump of sound more physical.  You might ask how he carried high-performance speakers on the plane. Actually he only packed speaker drivers but figured out an ingenious way to build the speaker enclosures from cardboard packing boxes, stuffed with polyfill, and sealed with tape.

On one table he set out his arsenal of recording tools including various mics including an Ambisonic Microphone, which is a full spectrum mic that can approximate sound in every direction. With its four capsules, standing upright, it appears to sport a toupee, a furry wind-hat, that makes it look like a mop headed cartoon charactor. He also has an underwater microphone and a small video camera that shoots 360 degrees. I couldn’t help but think of my days in film school at Rhode Island School of Design toting, around a massive Nagra reel-to-reel tape recorder. They were beautiful machines but all this new high tech gear is amazingly miniaturized.

John had cooked enchiladas and as we sat around a card table it seemed like we had gathered  as old friends even though we were newly met. The conversation flowed in every direction from art to teaching, and from our kids, to Nancy’s writing and film editing. At one point I asked John about the challenges he first encountered coming to Zion. He didn’t hesitate, “I had never had the experience of so much echoing sound, the difficulty of placing location. When you’re in a place in which there are so many surfaces for sound to reflect on, you can capture some of that (in recording) but a lot is un-reproducible.” Also, “Living in a city you come to expect things to be loud and so as a result when you find the quiet, it’s shocking.”

It was a delightful evening but John had something more in store for us. He excused himself as Nancy, Teresa and I continued to chat around the table. Then he beckoned us into the living room where he had set two canvas-covered foam mattresses with pillows on the floor. I looked at him, my eyes asking if a sleepover was in the cards. No, he wanted Teresa and me to lie down in that particular place to listen to his first composition. There was little explanation to prepare us further.

Living-room sound studio at the Grotto, Zion National Park

Sound Immersion

We lay down. John dimmed the lights and then started playing his recording. Describing it as immersive doesn’t do justice to what we experienced. Yes, there was wind, water, other elements from nature, and excerpts from an interview with Kaibab Paiute leader Daniel Bulletts. But the amazing thing was the way sound became embodied: sound swirled, it gyrated, it swelled on top of us, from side to side, and through us.

When the recording ended and the lights came up, we were dazed. When I could find words, I tried to describe the experience as sculptural, red cliffs incised with words. Teresa was moved by the way John had captured wind. She grew up on a ranch in Wyoming where the wind could blow without a break for weeks in the winter. She observed that often there is a phenomenon in incessant wind when you think someone is calling your name or there is music, just out of reach. She experienced that anew in this recording. In fact, John told us, there was the song of barbed wire being vibrated by the wind which he recorded with piezo contact mics.  As John observed, “Zion is a quiet place but at the same time it’s so intense, elementally intense. When the water floods, it floods big time. When water shoots out of the narrows it’s deadly. And when the wind picks up its scary.”

2 min, 36 second sound excerpt

It was time to go home so we put on our jackets and walked outside. After the spirited conversation over dinner we were now slowed down and tuned-up. We looked up into a circle of sky, framed by the vertical cliffs that rise close to the stone cabin. There were a few dimly lit clouds in the sky and on one cliff you could see that the full moon was about to peak out and bathe the canyon in blue light. The concert of sound had heightened our senses so that air had become electric with something born of magic, the beating of mother earth’s heart. Great thanks to John Roach, artist ranger.