Making Night Clouds Shine

Jeff Greinke pauses to reflect on his album Noctilucent. "This collection of works is the result of my first foray into using virtual instruments. Up until recently my studio had remained fairly static since the early, mid-90’s. I started to upgrade my gear slowly a couple of years ago, then early in 2021 began exploring plugin instruments, primarily a variety of synthesizers I obtained through Native Instruments. I found having access to several new instruments at once, with seemingly infinite capacity to manipulate sound, to be incredibly inspiring."

He continues, "My growth as an artist has been very, very slow, but I do believe I have evolved some over the 40 years I’ve been making music. I’m a better musician - keyboardist primarily - but still not an especially adept player. My studio technique, particularly with respect to layering and mixing sounds, has become more refined. This is where I have concentrated much of my attention throughout the years.

"This album verges more toward what I consider to be ambient music than anything I’ve done in decades. My focus was on creating soundscapes rich in texture, evocative moods, and abundant three-dimensional space. Melody and more conventional timbres such as those created by traditional acoustic instruments, which had become a greater focus of mine in recent prior years, have either retreated further into the background or are absent altogether. All of the music was electronically produced. I found it refreshing and somewhat liberating to go back to exploring sounds using synthesizers to sculpt my soundworlds, with the expansive palette those instruments provide and abundant opportunity to manipulate sounds.”

There are no markings on the night sky, though there exist many sky maps to aid stargazers in identifying constellations and other celestial objects. Zodiacal light is a glow that appears near the points where the sun rises and sets, and is caused by sunlight interacting with interplanetary dust, modulated, suggestive, and artistically molded.

The music on this album, Noctilucent, is an invitation to the listener to immerse deeply into a sonic landscape that feels good in one’s ears and is always highly stimulating to the imagination. "I decided on the title after I had finished the album because it captures how I experience this music," quoting the composer, Jeff Greinke. "To my ears this is night music. The sonic shades and colors tend to be darker, the music has considerable mystery, some of the tracks are a bit unsettling, while others quieter and more peaceful. That said, many of the works contain some brighter characteristics - “shining” timbres - like points or rays of light within these otherwise darker soundworlds. Scenes such as, perhaps, an abandoned urban street, late at night, with street lights illuminating fog. Or how I imagine viewing the Aurora Borealis or noctilucent cloud formations."

All of the sounds heard on Greinke's new album Noctilucent are electronic, made by keyboards with samples, forming textures and atmospheric presences. Dare you to explore this dark new sonic territory? Tonight after the midnight bell sounded there was a light in the dark tower. We seem to fly over it with a feverish craving for testing the naturally woven barriers between reality and imagination, finding marvelous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear. Noctilucent is a term used in meteorology to define a rare type of cloud phenomena, called night shining clouds, which occur in the upper atmosphere, higher than any other cloud. They exhibit tenuous wavy patterns, are silvery or bluish white, and are typically visible on summer nights in high latitudes.

Many great things may be said of this composer, including that he never disguised his ghostly visions with unnatural explanations. He finds inspiration for music in landscape, clouds, the sound of birds and insects, changing light, and different kinds of weather. Atmospheric tides dominate the dynamics of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere, serving as an important mechanism for transporting energy from the upper atmosphere into the lower atmosphere, and this is what you will hear.

All of the music was electronically produced. In much of his more recent work, Greinke incorporates acoustic instruments including piano, cello, viola, violin, French horn, clarinets, flutes, and small percussion, blended subtle and exquisitely with electronica. Here in Noctilucent, the sound is entirely synthesized. I can but speculate about the variety of his amassed personal collection of digital sound samples, full of beauty of every kind. This is a studio product, allowing Greinke total freedom and avoiding the scheduling and logistics of ensemble collaborations, the artist can remain under an imaginative spell which lends to the wild scenery an added weirdness, strangeness, and suggestion of a personal, imaginative whirlpool.

It is a wild adventure we are on. Here, as we are rushing along through the darkness, with the cold from the river seeming to rise up and strike us; with all the mysterious voices of the night around us, we seem to be drifting into unknown places and unknown ways; into a whole world of dark and dreadful things.

Making music is by far Greinke's greatest passion, nature has informed and shaped this work in subtle but persistently significant ways. He has a seemingly insatiable drive to be in the studio and work with sound. He puts a tremendous amount of care into this work, the joy creating music brings out all the glorious colors of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingle, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rise grandly over the desert gardens. Clouds are often close enough to afford some depth perception, though they are hard to see without moonlight or light pollution. Clouds obscure the view of other objects in the sky, though varying thicknesses of cloud cover have differing effects. A very thin cirrus cloud in front of the moon might produce a rainbow-colored ring around the moon. Stars and planets are too small or dim to take on this effect, and are instead only dimmed by skyglow, often to the point of invisibility.

Listen - I think I hear something out there in the darkness... what is it?

The overall mood is tenebrious, the sound is primed for interpretation, like the clouds, with a huge vista appearing solid while being gentle. The music possesses a quite extraordinary range of different timbres and vibrates along with the air inside it. "Unrest" (4:31) seems in the darkness to be closing down upon us, flowing great masses of grayness, which here and there bestrewed the trees, produced a peculiarly weird and solemn effect, which carried on the thoughts and grim fancies engendered earlier in the evening, when the falling sunset threw into strange relief the ghost-like clouds which amongst the hidden mountains seem to wind ceaselessly through the valleys.

Irisations are named after the Greek goddess Iris, goddess of rainbows and messenger of Zeus and Hera to the mortals below. What sort of dark journey is it upon which we have embarked? The sound sometimes seeks to identify and describe the ways in which differing chemistry, magnetic fields, and thermodynamics on various planets affect the creation, evolution, diversity, and alarming disappearance of atmospheres. "Around the Corner" (7:43) slowly unfolding, elegant twirls of lavender and blue wrapping around each other like snakes; spirals and curls of silver and white glowing like the filaments of light bulbs; veils of gold spreading out from one side of the sky to the other.

The origin of Earth's oceans is unknown; oceans are thought to have formed in the Hadean eon and may have been the locus for the emergence of life. An ocean is a body of water that composes much of a planet's hydrosphere, extraterrestrial oceans may be composed of water or other elements and compounds, and there could be evidence for the existence of oceans elsewhere in the neighboring solar systems. "Of the Deep Sea" (5:02) brings purring leviathans and odd toothy monsters of huge sizes, and in the distance I hear a bell, bobbing loose on the waves, sounding nearer and farther, and then dissipating along the troubled surface of the water.

Astronomical night is the period between astronomical dusk and astronomical dawn when the sun is between 18 and 90 degrees below the horizon and does not illuminate the sky. "Into the Night" (9:29) has a cautious glowing presence, on very rare occasions the colors, instead of lying in irregular patches, form definite fringes round the borders of the cloudlets. It seems desirable, therefore, to make an attempt to search out what appears to be its explanation. I have none.

Just now a heavy cloud passes across the face of the moon, so that we are again in darkness. The path has become close, I can see even in the dim light that the stone was massively carved, but that the carving had been much worn by time and weather. At the bottom of a cavern or vault… no, this is a "Tunnel" (5:34), and eerie sounds emerge from the dark tube’s gaping maw just ahead. The tension beats like a railroad track, and luminous spectra are frequently seen. Here inside the mountain, impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs.

Currents are coherent streams of water moving through the ocean and include both long, permanent features such as the Gulf Stream, as well as smaller, episodic flows in both coastal waters and the open ocean. Gyres are spiraling circulations thousands of miles in diameter and rimmed by large, permanent ocean currents. The sound is distant and slow moving. Friction between the air and the water sets the sea surface in motion. As this topmost layer of water moves, it pulls on the water directly beneath it, which in turn pulls on the layer of water beneath that to create the beginnings of a descending ocean current, "Sinking" (7:53). Lapping waves, rushing water, and creaking masts, as we sink into the darkness I felt a strange chill, and a lonely feeling comes over me, with the cold from the water seeming to rise up and strike us; with all the mysterious voices of the night around us, it all comes home, imagining the distant lost sight and recollection of ghostly fears in the beauty, slow moving, swaying like a boat tossed on a slow motion stormy sea, peering into the composer's imaginative whirlpool full of beauty of every kind.

Unidentified lights and flying objects have been reported in the skies for much of human history. As the Earth is located within the dusty outer arms of our galaxy, there are large portions of the Milky Way that are obscured from view. Different cultures have created different groupings of constellations based on differing interpretations of the more-or-less random patterns of dots in the sky. Noctilucent clouds float high enough in the atmosphere to capture a little bit of stray sunlight even after the Sun has set below them. The title track, "Noctilucent" (5:43) provides a granular sensation of motion, perhaps a distant foghorn glow can be counted, conditions which will produce one sound-color round the margin of the cloud, and that color mixed with others, and so giving rise to other tints, farther in; at this specific unfolding altitude the texture is very complicated.

The phenomenon of day and night is due to the rotation of a celestial body about its axis, creating an illusion of the sun rising and setting. "Refractions" (4:42), complicate the appearances, as tonal mathematical sensations increase. We seem to be drifting into unknown places and unknown ways; into a whole world of dark and spectacular things. This is our strange topographic map. The colors are usually pastel, but can be very vivid or mingled together, sometimes similar to mother-of-pearl. When observing the signifying sky, the sound appears to be reflected in a convex mirror or in a pool of water.

The final track, "Undercurrent" (7:16), leaves us with underwater views of the stars, galaxies, nebulae and clusters. And they are gorgeous, but what are the signals coming from the basement of the old church in the graveyard? The light from the tiny lamps falls on all sorts of odd forms, as the rays cross each other, or the opacity of our bodies throws great shadows.

Composers sometimes seek new timbres. Night is often associated with trepidation and evil, because of the psychological connection of night's all-encompassing darkness to the fear of the unknown. Darkness's obstruction of the sense of sight is naturally associated with vulnerability and danger for human physical survival. As I speculated earlier, there are no markings on the night sky, though there exist many sky maps to aid stargazers in identifying constellations and other celestial objects.

These nine slowly unfolding tracks offer multi-layered textures, the midst of the whirl and unknown night journeys, that weave sampled acoustic and electronic instrumentation into a gossamer soundscape that shimmers with the stillness of a perfectly calm atmosphere in the warm light of early dusk. Greinke realizes his musical vision through an empirical process of improvisation and experimentation, combining tracks and layering sounds, and uncovering the magical moments as they reveal themselves as far as the imagination can grasp it through the gloom of the night.

Jeff Greinke is an American jazz musician, ambient electronic composer, performer, sound sculptor, improvisor, and visual artist. He began composing and performing music in 1980 while studying meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, and moved to Seattle in 1982. He has been very busy throughout his career with various collaborative projects, including pioneering work with Rob Angus, and later with LAND, Hana, and various solo projects. These days he is based in Tucson, Arizona. Greinke's unique approach on his ambient work is to heavily layer, multitrack, and texture soundscapes, using the studio as an instrument. His early work often has a dark ambient quality, with his earlier solo albums often compared to works by Robert Rich, Brian Eno, and Vidna Obmana.

"I also listen to a lot of music and am sure some of what I hear informs my own work. Over the past year or so I’ve been listening to and very much enjoying artists such as Hania Rani, Olafur Arnolds, Arve Henriksen, Snori Hallgrimsson, Taylor Deupree, and Sophie Hutchens to name a few."

His sound is always changing, like the weather, from rain and wind to endless blue skies, and sometimes with ephemeral delicately drifting clouds.

In closing, a creative overview from Greinke: "I am quite strongly influenced by my visual and aural surroundings. I take long walks most days in the desert, sometimes at night under a full moon and am often inspired by what I see, hear, and experience - the texture of the landscape, clouds, the sound of birds and insects, changing light, and different kinds of weather."