Sound Sculptures
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Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook. Pat Zentz makes sculptures... and those sculptures make sounds.

And what play these sounds are elements of the weather and the environment. A breeze, a stream, the rays of the sun.

His sculptures are large oak frameworks that he sets up outside. With things like pressure sensors, wind vanes, cables and levers, or a melting block of ice, he can connect percussion, wind and stringed instruments to the weather.

"My work deals with perceiving what is the most common in a given environment. Like here, where we're sitting, it would be the heat of that sun that we're feeling right now. It might be the wind.

So what you hear is the pulse of the wind activity, like we're feeling now. The ebb and flow of the wind.

That alludes to and leads to what I refer to when I talk about the spirit of things and I guess that's what my art is about. It's trying to...trying to investigate the drama of being in a place. Understanding what it means to be here."

Weather sculpted sounds from Pat Zentz. Zentz was recorded on his family's ranch in eastern Montana by independent producer Barrett Golding of Bozeman.