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CD
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NOR 267CD
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This is the soundtrack to Touch the Sound, the highly-acclaimed documentary that takes us on a remarkable journey with Evelyn Glennie, one of the world's foremost musicians and a Grammy-winning classical percussionist whose solo work is unrivaled. She is also deaf. Through her, sound is palpable and rhythm is the basis of everything. Without vibration, there is nothing. From silence to music, from hearing to seeing and to feeling, sound is felt through every sense in her body. Cinematographer and director Thomas Riedelsheimer (director of the award-winning box office success Rivers and Tides) demonstrates his knack for mapping a world of senses, of colorful images and evocative sounds from Japan, England, California and New York. The film and soundtrack deliberately avoids what makes up Evelyn's musical everyday life: her concerts and performances with the world's biggest orchestras. Gently, we hear Evelyn Glennie as she brings a large tam tam to life with the lightest of touch as well as the instruments and the library of sounds that Evelyn carries within herself -- the clattering of rollers on the suitcases in an airport; the whirring of air conditioners in a sweltering New York City; resounding fog horns in Northern California, and the cacophony of voices in a Japanese market place. The soundscapes, rhythms and symphonic memories of Evelyn's trips around the world mix together with her musical encounters: a jam session with Cuban jazz drummer Horazio Hernandez on the roof of a skyscraper in New York, a recording session with American avant-garde master Fred Frith, a booming thunderstorm with the Japanese Taiko group Ondekoza, a duet with tap dancer Roxanne Butterfly on a sidewalk in Harlem. For Evelyn, sound is everything. At eight years old her sense of hearing deteriorated as the result of a neuropathy. She developed instead an ability to feel sound by learning how to use her body as a resonating chamber. Today Evelyn lives and communicates without a hearing aid. She not only lip reads, but "listens," and hears, with every one of her senses. Evelyn performs on the following percussion instruments on this CD: simtak, tam tam, empty cans, snaredrum, railings, Gamelan gongs, Shishidoshi (bamboo clapper), wind whistle, thunder sheet, chopsticks, marimba, oceandrum and waterphone.
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