The Grooved Whale Project

AMBIENT/ELECTRONIC ALBUM OF THE YEAR
New Age Voice Magazine, June 2002

This is not an album of environmental sound for relaxation, though listening to it might have a calming effect. The work is more like a process by which the listener can escape its human separateness and hear the underwater world as a web of diverse energies enfolded within one deep rhythm beyond our perception. The voice of the violin speaks the language of the whales…a natural dialogue that sounds as a chorus of liquid brightness.
Marius-Christian Burcea , FUN Radio Romania

Wonderful, wonderful piece of work here. This music is sooooooooo cool. Keep the music coming.
Charlie Stehlin, “Freeform Radio”  WMNF, FL

A refined work with the finest nuances for the heart and ears of music fans.
Alexei Krupsky, “Visionary Voyager” Belarus

Lisa Walker has just released a self-produced CD that is the most invigorating music yet to be made with whales. Rather than simply soaring with the grandeur of humpback songs, Walker’s music draws on her classical violin training, as well as her youthful engagement with new media and a deep sensual connection with the watery world of the whales, to create Grooved Whale Centered on her own recordings of especially evocative whale songs, Walker blends violin, electronics, and, yes, some solid grooves, to take us far down the path she has traveled in listening to, and playing music with, humpbacks. Her secret ingredient, and one that sets this disc in a class of its own, is that she records most of her violin parts underwater. She uses underwater speakers to play into canyons and other especially resonant landscapes, which gives the playing a tonal, as well as a spiritual, connection to the soundings of the whales.
Jim Cummings, EarthEar Records

Some years ago, whale sounds proliferated contemporary instrumental music. Any musician who could get to the “environmental” bin of their corner new age bookshop’s music department could overlay the songs of the Humpback whale into whatever project was at hand. Originally meant to raise the consciousness of an unaware public, whale recordings turned up in enough recordings so as to eventually be taken for granted; the true meaning of the recordings lost in a trend of clichéd sampling. Grooved Whale is an album by Lisa Walker which incorporates her evocative violin playing, sparse electronics and her very own unique field recordings of whale calls. The CD returns authenticity to what once was a compelling movement to raise mainstream awareness of interspecies communications and the mingling of these voices with music.

Most space music deals with transporting the listener to an ineffable place, out at the edge of the universe or deep within the human psyche. On Grooved Whale, Walker takes the listener to a place where she has been and we have not; on location to the environment where her whales dwell. The music is as interesting as the process. Present are the magnificent songs and calls of the whale, but there is also Walker’s beautiful violin leads and textures, taken to the full emotional measure her instrument has to offer and often played underwater using custom waterproof gear. In her insightful liner notes, Walker tells of the whales in attendance at these performances and the effect her playing had on them. As for the effect on humans, Grooved Whale offers us a sound collage of subtle synth sequences and pads supporting swimming violin melodies brought to life by Walker’s insight into, passion for and familiarity with the gentle giants of the sea. Listener response will range from an overall sense of relaxation and contemplation in response to Walker’s sonic craftsmanship up to an earthling’s awe at the order and place of intelligent life on the planet
Chuck van Zyl, STAR’S END

This recording is as immense and beautiful as the depth of the oceans and the animals she has recorded and plays along with. The symphony that is the total recording of Lisa’s Grooved Whale is breathtaking and inspiring. Tracks segue into the next and variations on themes are throughout mixed in with the songs of whales. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference between the samples and her playing, which is both reverent and velvety.
Roger Greer, KXCI Radio, Tucson

According to writer Thomas Moore, medieval music theorists distinguished between musica mundana, the music of the natural world, musica humana, the music of the human body and soul, and musica instrumentalis, the music made with voices and instruments. In Grooved Whale, musician Lisa Walker blends all three of those medieval categories into what could be called musica fantastica cetacea.

Walker’s studio is also her home in Coal Harbour,Vancouver BC. Much of her time, though, is spent trying to stay warm and dry in the humpback whale’s feeding grounds in southeastern Alaska, with the occasional reprieve in their wintering and birthing grounds around Hawaii. For the last four years she has been part of a research expedition studying the acoustic ecology of the humpback or “grooved” whale in those Pacific waters. Initially she worked as a sound consultant and more recently she has been focussing on music and her own acoustic studies. Grooved Whale, her second CD, was inspired by and created from the whale sounds that she recorded during the last four years.

The twelve compositions on Grooved Whale flow into each other like ocean currents, and yet each has its own mood and musical themes. Some, like “Tenakee,” named after the narrow inlet in which it was recorded, and “WinterSong” were composed purely from the arcing squeals and deep groans of the whales. Others incorporate additional “found sounds” lapping waves, boat motors, and the echoing drips and rivulets in “Grotto.” “Melancholy” begins with surface, lapping sounds and then plunges into the muffled gurgling and reverberations of the deep. The vocalizations of the whales against this watery background create a synesthesia, as though you can both hear and see the huge swoops of their haunting calls.

Most of the songs on this CD layer the sounds of the sea and its creatures with human instruments drums. Walker loves to play her violin through an underwater speaker, experimenting with the effects of underwater geography on the sound. The resulting music, woven into some of the compositions on this recording, is almost indistinguishable from the whale songs.

Grooved Whale pulls us gently into the world of these mystical creatures, into the rhythms and cadences of their voices. It also reminds us of the precariousness of their existence. “When I return to Vancouver and look out on our empty waters, where humpbacks and orcas used to swim and roam,” says Walker, “I can only hope that one day our waters will again be full of sounds.”
Joyce Hildebrand, Encompass Magazine

Whale Music musician Lisa Walker plays concerts to an underwater audience, lives in a boat, and makes some of the most soothing music you will ever hear.
Sugarbush Magazine

Whales – magnificent creatures – mighty yet graceful, breathtaking in size and of course hunted by Mankind to the edge of extinction. New age hippies have embraced whale sounds since the 60’s and flog uncountable numbers of lethargic wet semi-Ambient and thin adaptations of Classical music in incense-perfumed high street bazaars and nature centres to gullible folk who are superficially charmed by the tendrils of limp sound they encounter whenever they pass one of those freebie jukebox pushbutton thingies covered with pictures of wain forests, waterfalls, wolves and, yes, whales.

Lisa Walker, although she seems to embrace some of the ethics of this counter-Counter Culture (she records her violin under water, and indeed uses Whale sounds in her recordings), has managed to create a chimeral beast being both dangerous and charming, and thus ultimately beautiful. She manages to naturally capture the essence of what nature is – cold, bloody, painful and dangerous – countered with the myriad reasons why we have hunted creatures like Leopards to the edge of oblivion – the possession of a beauty we could never even dream of calling our own.

Her tunes vary from moody insubstantial things to rigid structuring, with some mighty fine violin playing seeming to embrace Classical, Folk and Modern musics without ever stepping too far from credibility. And she’s not afraid to utilize noise – not just that of the Whales, but aircraft, short wave transmissions, dog bark and a multitude of others.

Not every moment of this album is in your face – she uses drifting sequencer passages as interludes, bringing a more technically accomplished ORB to mind. In true Ambient fashion, she takes the time between her distinctive motifs, to explore strange and fascinating areas of her sound, recreating a strange but wonderful world in sound.
One of the triumphs here is her subtle use of Drum ‘n’ Bass on “Hawaii Gruv” – anyone who knows my reviews will be familiar with my dislike of genre hopping insincerity. But here I feel it’s assimilation is so subtle and symbiotic that it is part of the very nature of the music, blending as it does with a more Traditional, Ethnic take on what is Jungle!

On “ViolinLaugh” she nods towards the slow drift tranmutations of Vangelis’s “Soil Festivities”; on “Melancholy” she moves towards the “Sky Flowers & Horses Eggs” area of experimentalism – studio-tamed location recordings and abstract violin work.
The bottom line? A less press-button Tangerine Dream. Pink Floyd swapping guitars for violins and creating multifacetted instrumentals instead of songs? All in all a brave attempt to escape clichéd ideas of what music best suits Whale Song. Breathtaking beauty blended with more than a hint of discord and danger. A triumph!
Antony Burnham metamorph@softwatch.freeserve.co.uk

A number of albums put nature sounds and music together and they generally fit one of three categories. Either the nature sound is just spliced with the music for effect, the musician does a call and response kind of playback with birds and animals, or the musician composes, using the nature sounds as an integrated part of the music. This later approach is what Lisa Walker does quite stunningly. When I first listened to Grooved Whale, I didn’t identify the whale sounds right away. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but my first impression was that it was some sort of intricate synthesizer composition with many layers of mystifying, unidentifiable sounds. Then I looked at the album jacket, and started listening all over again. She perceives herself as learning to speak their language. She recognizes the natural beauty of the whales’ songs and they inspire her amazing original compositions using violin with specially built waterproof speakers so that her sound will resonate with the whales’ natural landscape. Her effort is unique in that she has taken into consideration the seasonal variation of the songs, the sonic character of different underwater canyons and she uses loops and samples to modulate the sound and emphasize the musicality in more dramatic fashion. Lisa Walker shows a deep understanding of her subject and a remarkable capacity for innovation. If you like deep space or ambient music, this one is definitely one you will want to hear.
New Age Voice January 2002

This extraordinary album is the product of interspecies communication: a synthesis of whale songs and violin, both recorded underwater. Walker melds time as a whale researcher in Alaska and Hawaii with her prowess as a violinist to produce an exciting new sound that uses the mystery of whale songs as the foundation of aquatic harmonies. Filled out by gentle synth rhythms, whale and violin merge as well as shine on their own. With a unique method of projecting her violin’s sound into underwater canyons. Walker brings forth a tonal quality that is haunting and joyful at the same time. The liner notes relate the fascinating account of her discovery of this unique sound along with the story of the first track’s whale call recorded at night amongst a pod of humpbacks. This album brings a whole new definition to the term “fluid dynamics” and gives listeners the aural experience of a pure human/cetacean interaction.
NAPRA Review

My friend the Whale wouldn’t let me end this column without mentioning Lisa Walker’s Grooved Whale (Earthear), which I suppose qualifies as world music by dint of its non-English speaking singers and Pacific Ocean recording locations. The back-cover category label “Interspecies Ambient” gave me hope that classically trained violinist Walker would jam with cetaceans in real time, but assuming the large-brained mammals would waste their time with our follies is perhaps expecting too much. Instead, Walker broadcasts her plaintive violin parts into underwater caverns and records the resulting “crazy reverbs, frequency loss and attenuation” for a kind of hydrophonic signal processing. Her melodies, textures and sound layering are blended with looped and processed humpback whale vocalizations, often creating an eerie back-and-forth effect with a melancholy footprint reminiscent of Scandinavian folk music. I’d love to hear the results on a Nordic hardanger violin, though “Boogie” directly references an Irish air. Or should that be Irish Sea, considering the recording environment?
Dave Hacker, Technobeat

Ever since people have been making music, we have looked to other musical species for inspiration. Western music has several examples inspired by birdsong, but with the advent of scientific field recordings in the 1950s and 1960s, we have discovered the musical master of the seas, the humpback whale. With its fascinating and complex sounds, and combined with the unusual properties of underwater sound distribution, the songs of the humpback have had a special resonance for musicians since the 1970 release of Dr. Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale< (still the best selling environmental sound recording ever). Artists like Paul Winter and Paul Horn have worked with whale song, performing duets with wind instruments (flute and soprano sax) and whales. Some musicians have also explored the different resonant properties of underwater recordings. Sound properties are very different underwater than in the air — sound travels faster, but can become delayed and distorted because of its reflection on boundaries of waves, bubbles, or undersea surfaces. Since Michel Redolfi’s experiments with underwater concerts twenty years ago, several artists have used speakers and hydrophones (underwater microphones) to excellent use. More recently, scientists and musicians have collaborated in concerts that have attempted to use music to communicate with various species of whales, such as a recent concert in Seattle where the City Cantabile Choir used a special speaker system to communicate with the Orca Whales that summer in the Puget Sound.

Lisa Walker, a sound artist resident in the Pacific Northwest, combines whalesong and underwater sound projection on her second CD release, Grooved Whale, an exploration of interspecies ambience that combines whalesong Walker recorded in Alaska and Hawaii with her own violin music projected underwater. Walker spent several years as a sound consultant on whale research projects, as well as an artist-in-residence period at Simon Fraser University where she developed her Midi Violin system. Her violin provides an excellent foil to the whales and is a welcome and interesting change from the more typical wind instruments. In addition to field and studio recordings, for this release she played through underwater speakers and recorded them back, incorporating the underwater sounds into the final compositions.

In addition to the imitative sounds of the violin and the whales, Walker’s in-depth knowledge of the whale song structures her music as well. In the liner notes to the album, she focuses on two different types of whalesong: the feeding calls that groups of whales use to harvest huge amounts of herring; and the long winter songs that are the humpback whale’s epic poems, brought back each year during mating season, always with new additions and variations to the songs of the previous years, and which can last up to a half hour in length. These two types of songs are the boundaries of Grooved Whale, which opens with the Tenakee Feeding Call recorded in Alaska, and closes with a snippet of the Winter Song. Walker emphasizes the circularity of the album with a repeated arpeggiated figure used in both the second and penultimate tracks, but the remainder of the album displays a wide variety of ambient music. The violin serves the whalesongs remarkably well, with the sounds morphing into each other. About half of the tracks have gentle percussion sounds, getting into a rhythmic tribal beat as on Hawaii Gruv, a faster click track inspired by the whales’ echolocation sonar on Vertigo, or the climactic primal pulse of Transfixed. The rhythm serves as an underpinning to Walker’s violin, which she combines into lush string orchestras as well as the enhanced solo lines of ViolinLaugh or the traditional hornpipe of Boogie. The music of the whales is blended into the plaintive string melodies and mysterious atmospheres. Walker also mixes in water sounds, recalling her field work as we hear the sounds of the whales’ flukes as they dive, the waves lapping against the sides of the boat, and the radio transmissions that contrast the rough human communications with the beautiful and eerie songs of the humpbacks.

Walker and EarthEar’s Jim Cummings have done a superb packaging job for Grooved Whale. Inevitably, a work inspired by interspecies communication accepts a more environmental worldview, and Grooved Whalecomes in a environmentally-friendly digipak with extensive liner notes on whalesong, Walker’s personal recollections of field recording, a brief status of the whales’ current population (holding steady now after a significant decline in the mid 1960s), and a brief selection from Joan McIntyre’s celebratory book on whales, Mind in the Waters. Walker provides even more information, along with whalesong sound examples interspersed with an introductory explanation of underwater listening, on her website,.
Reviewed by Caleb Deupree for Ambient Visions

Whale songs are as ubiquitous in new age music as soaring flute solos and flamenco guitar. But Lisa Walker has used whales songs to make something really stunning on her album Grooved Whale. A classically trained violinist, Walker studied the language of whales for several years in their natural habitats off the coasts of Alaska and Hawaii. Her musical background enabled her to both discern and appreciate the subtle qualities of the whale’s calls and over time, and she developed a deep love and respect for the whales and the diverse array of sounds that they produced. Walker also became fascinated with the acoustic qualities of the water itself. Grooved Whale is an experimental album that builds upon these loves and fascinations. Walker combines the sounds of the whales, both in their original recorded forms and electronically altered to change pitch, texture, and duration, with recordings of her violin, played in an underwater chamber and recorded through the water using special speakers. The result, when combined sparingly with other sounds from the seashore environment (water dripping, sloshing, and slapping against boat hulls, dogs barking, etc.) is haunting, spiritual, hypnotic, and thoroughly engaging. Both the whales and Walker’s violin produce wavering tones that at times seem interchangeable. Few recordings have so seamlessly integrated whale songs into the musical environment; Grooved Whale accomplishes that while also showing a great respect and love for noble and endangered creatures.
Stacia Proefrock, All Music Guide

Electroshock Presents: “Electroacoustic Music. Vol. VII” (Electroshock Records 2003, ELCD 036) 16 tracks. Total time – 77:34.

Electroacoustic series, plunders the electronic musical hills and valleys of USA, Israel, Canada and Europe, bringing together a variety of artists that live and breath through their electronic machinery. Canada’s talented Lisa Walker emits her considerable faculty on the superb opening, “Transients”. A haunting collection of emotionally binding strings tear at the heartstrings as Walker sows a chugging drum-box beat into the mix, whilst an exquisite, highly-charged electro warble pulses throughout. Superb. Danny Tumer (“Barcode”)