Since childhood Bill Close has associated sounds with nature. As a boy, he spent a lot of time at a pond near his home. “The wind would blow through long reeds and create tones,” he recalls. “The bullfrogs would sing this amazing opera at dusk.” Summers were spent sailing on his grandfather’s boat in Buzzards Bay. “Sailboats create amazing sounds. Some of the halyards run all the way up and some only run say halfway up, and this affects how quickly they slap against the mast, creating all these neat polyrhythms.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Now Close designs, builds, and plays his own musical instruments. Five years ago he brought home a piece of driftwood and laid it down next to an exhaust pipe. Noticing that they looked alike, he carved the wood into the tuning end of a stringed instrument, connected it to the exhaust pipe, attached electric-guitar strings, amplified it, and “was just blown away.” Close has since built 20 original instruments and says that a lot of his work touches both “visually and sonically on the rhythms–the cycles of life” that he first observed while watching the seasons change at the pond.
Close’s early sonic experiences were “interactive”–he fished the pond and sailed the boats–and MASS’s performances are somewhat interactive as well. “We realized that to play the long bows brought out this movement because of the way you run the glove along the strings; you literally have to travel a distance,” and that allows people “visual access to the music.” Close says that after a MASS concert one group told him that “they actually visually understood what sounds were made, why the downbeat happened when it did–and it was a bit of a lesson because you could visually identify where that sound ends and where it begins.”
