We’re previewing Deep Fields — Synambient’s site-specific ambient show at the Strasenberg Planetarium, happening Sept 17–19 at 7:30pm as part of the Rochester Fringe (the whole festival runs Sept 15–26) — snag tickets at rochesterfringe.com ($19.99) if you want to come float with us under the James Webb images.

Check out the episode on Just Can't Not wherever you get your podcasts or on Lunchador.org!

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/26815ea4-15c1-4c95-bcdd-b472ad622c1f/

I’m Chris and guests James and Gerry gabbed about how they stretched a tiny two‑minute theme into a 47 minute, 30 second slow-burn sound journey — think ultra-elongated counterpoint, synth choirs, and textures that make you feel both infinitesimally small and oddly majestic. We walk you through the piece’s sections (First Light → Luminous → Penumbra → Event Horizon), including that glorious bit where the dome goes pitch black and the music almost disappears — a tiny, intentional silence that’s basically a sonic reset button. On top of the backing track we’ll perform live with two synths (including a Moog), plus a MIDI guitar that triggers choir/organ sounds so visually you’ll see guitarists doing choir duty — surprise! We also explain a bit about ambient music: it’s less about flashy riffs and more about long tones, subtle shifts, and feeling the space — influenced by classical slow‑arc composers and film music, but fully its own cosmic vibe. If you want a mellow, contemplative break from the perpetual scroll and some high‑resolution Webb visuals to stare at while we soundtrack the cosmos, come to Deep Fields — we’ll give you time to breathe, think, and maybe get a little cosmic chill. See you out on the Fringe — come feel small in the best possible way.

Mentioned in this episode:

Joe Bean Roasters

Visit joebeanroasters.com to get fresh roasted specialty coffee either by the bag or with a Perpetual Joy subscription!

Oh, man, this is atmospheric to start.

This is not the typical music for the start of Just Can't Not.

So I'm the host, Chris Lindstrom, and we're here doing previews for the Rochester Fringe festival, happening from September 15th to the 26th in scenic downtown Rochester, New York.

Make sure you go to rochesterfringe.com to get your tickets for as many events as you can possibly go to.

And I'm here with some guests who have provided the music for today's episode.

Guests, why don't you introduce yourselves?

Hi, I'm James Tabby.

Yeah.

And.

And I'm Jerry Symansky.

We are Synambient.

Yes.

And you are doing Deep Fields, which is a show happening on September 17th, 18th and 19th at 7:30pm at the Strassenberg Planetarium at the Rochester Science museum.

So, James, why don't you tell me a little bit about this project?

Because I had you over last year with a different project, but why don't you tell me about this one?

Sure.

So, Jerry, let me tell you a little bit about Sanambian first.

So Jerry and I got together a couple years ago.

We had been friends for a while and decided that we should try to make music together.

And I had had this concept of an ambient project where mostly what I had been doing is synth pop and dance music and.

And the like.

But my original foray into music composition, back when I was a teenager, was playing sounds on a guitar that didn't.

That weren't that musical.

But they.

But they were pretty, I thought.

And so I'd always wanted to go back to ambient music.

And Jerry and I had a great conversation over lunch at Orange Glory on East Main Street.

Highly recommend it.

Beautiful.

And we decided to start a project.

It ended up getting called Synambient.

It was going to be Syntambient, which would have been Jerry Symansky and James Tabby, but that was too much of.

A mouthful, too many syllables, too many consonants for the situation.

And so we've been working for a couple years.

Yeah, I want to say it's about three years now.

Yeah.

Because we started just sort of, you know, fooling around.

And then we really aimed at a performance for last year's Fringe Festival, and we used a medieval song as our basis, the Lamar May song, the Armed Man.

And we kind of tweaked it to be the Disarmed man and performed at the Spirit Room for two different shows.

I have a composition degree background, and my training is pretty much all classical.

And I've written things for orchestra, choir, choirs, you know, lots of chamber music songs, the whole bit.

So this, for me, was a way to expand my own musical palette and my concept of sort of what a composition could be.

We kind of treated the La Marmee song like all these composers in the Renaissance and the Borough period did, where they used it as the basis of a mass.

Oh, okay.

A lot of times in the Kyrie, the beginning movement.

And they would have the tune in pretty long notes, and then they would write all this stuff around it, usually for the.

For choirs.

And so we kind of did that.

You know, we were kind of improvising around it.

I was playing recorder, James was playing synthesizer.

And then interspersed between the music, we asked our audience members to come up and read the Lamar May poem in either English or in French.

And then we tweaked it to become the Disarmed Man.

And it was really amazing to see the response of the folks that attended our show.

They were super cool about it.

And we even had somebody read it in Italian.

Like, they translated it into Italian on the spot.

Alive.

It was the fun part about that piece.

Piece was the actual theme, Lo Marme in the canon is only about two minutes long, and we made it ambient by basically stretching that two minutes over a half hour.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So every quarter Note was, like 30 seconds long, and the performance was two cycles of that while we were playing over the top of that.

That bass line.

And it was really beautiful.

You got a sense of what it was without actually hearing that original theme in its.

In its normal pace.

Yeah.

So I find it fascinating because, like, as somebody who, you know, during my high school years, I was in a lot of, like, you know, you know, we're doing competition, you know, choral singing.

So you do a lot of chamber music, Right.

You're doing a lot of Latin music, you know, a lot of classics.

Right.

These are either tunes, you know, or in the end, like, oh, they're the resonant, and they can be slower.

Right.

And they're more.

It's about that, you know, combination of all of the voices together that would fill these big rooms.

It would fill these churches that have these amazing, you know, these amazing, you know, sound chambers that are bringing things to life, and they become so present.

And when you're in the middle of that, even as somebody who didn't, like, I'm not.

Don't have religion in my life or anything like that.

That feeling.

Right.

Those rooms are made to have that feeling.

It is spiritual.

Yeah.

And that, you know, that's something where this, you know, immediately has.

Has feeling.

Right.

It's not the most individually complex in any individual moment, but it drives a feeling.

And I'll say, you know, the first thing that came to my mind when this has been playing in the background is, man, this feels.

God feels Blade Runner.

Like there's this, there's this, there's this just driving feeling that you're lingering with as you're sitting with it.

So we should talk about what we're hearing right now.

So this is the backing track for our performance at the Strassenberg Planetarium Deep Field Fields.

And the section that we're listening to right now is called First Light.

The piece is in seven sections and it really just flows from one section to the other, this one being First Light.

The whole idea, the concept that we had when we were actually approached by the Strassenberg because they'd been looking for local musicians to do site specific compositions.

And then we said, well, why don't we do this for the time First Fringe?

And we just sat down with Jim Bader, the director of Strassenberg, and kind of conceived of this idea that they had not really projected anything from the James Webb telescope yet onto the dome.

So we.

That is a deep field telescope.

And so we just kind of went with that idea and started working on composing.

We sat down with them, we looked at images from James Webb projected onto the dome and were inspired to go back and work for what, about nine months on this hour long, 47 and 30 minute.

40 Minute, 47 minute and 30 second composition.

Wow.

Which is, you know, almost the academic hour.

Yeah.

I'm like, what a lush text as well, right?

Like this is.

That's here.

We're on.

We're on a constant schedule.

But like, what, what a lush canvas to reflect on.

Right.

That, like those images, like we saw, you know, what, 20 years ago, you know, we saw the images from Hubble 25 years ago, and they were mind expanding and mind blowing all at the same time.

And then you see, you see the ones coming off of, you know, off of the web, and it's like, oh, that feeling that I had as a 25 years younger person, I'm feeling again now after living all of that time.

And see, you can still feel it.

We're from an age where we saw those first voyager images of Jupiter and Saturn and you Know, I grew up.

With Carl Sagan totally blown away.

You know, this was just very exciting.

And, you know, for me, knowing how kind of dicey the launch of the James Webb Telescope was, and, you know, they kept talking about, okay, it has to go out, like, a million miles, you know, pretty far away from Earth and the moon to sort of, you know, not be influenced by us.

And then they had to unfold this filigree, and everything was like, okay, this might not work.

This might be like a, you know, billions of dollars of disaster.

And.

And then it did work.

And then, you know, they're like, okay, we're getting some images.

You're gonna love them.

And of course, we were all blown away by what we saw.

Yeah.

And it's one of those things when you see kind of does make you pause.

Right.

And there's this constant influx of information all the time packaged in the smallest amount of time, without context, without time to really sit with something and feel it and understand it.

And even just looking at these images kind of forces you to pause.

But I love the context of this, that you can bring feeling and emotion through that process.

And we really.

Our goal was to have people come into this performance, into this space, and spend 47 minutes just alone with these images and these very gentle sounds.

Yeah.

And find that contemplation, find that meditative space, feel infinitesimal and huge at the same time, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, but what a.

What a great opportunity to do that.

And I have to imagine, like, creating that is a purposeful decision through every moment of writing something like this.

And when you mentioned you don't write this kind of thing very often, Jerry, like, how is this.

How is this stepping outside of what you usually are used to writing?

It has to be this delightful thing.

What's really interesting if I. Yeah, sure.

Because I. I am.

Come from the opposite of Jesus, where Jerry comes from history, the world of musical composition.

Being a lecturer at Eastman and Eastman Music School Librarian.

I come from, you know, electronic music, EDM and the like.

Our approach to this was very interesting because it's actually.

What you're hearing now is actually 4.4 part counterpoint.

It.

It is very traditional composition, but just.

Stretched way out, so really, really elongated.

Yeah.

And, you know, like, that's.

That's what you just heard is like this.

This amazing, you know, cadence that you would sort of hear in classical music.

And so I was constantly.

As we were working it, I would say to James, okay, you have to listen to this.

And we would listen to the opening of Wagner's Das Rheingold.

The overture of that is in E flat.

And it's just like four minutes of just E flat with all this sort of filigree around it with just ever so slightly subtle shifts, or I'd say, oh, you should listen to this film music.

And it's just like this wonderful thing that just sort of has this kind of slow motion feel about it.

And the other thing is that we are.

You can start to hear there's some high pitches now.

We sort of expanded the texture, the timbre, making sure that we had high, low and medium frequencies.

Some of the voices are more what we would call synthesizer y.

Some are more evocative of voices of choirs.

We have a little bit of percussion in there.

And so it has.

Even though it's just a sort of slow motion thing, it does have this orchestral texture to it.

It.

Yeah.

And it, you know, if you could pay an orchestra to play this slowly, you could.

And, you know, there are certain composers like, you know, Morton Lawrence writes pretty slow things.

Arvo Parrot is known for.

He's a minimalist, but he's like.

He writes very slow things.

Even Philip Glass can write, you know, pretty slow stuff that has this, you know, ever subtle changing as each note.

We do have parts where we consider every measure is like a separate chord.

And then we have sections where there's a little bit faster harmonic movement.

Yeah.

And, you know, listening to Elgar's Nimrod from which is used in tons of movies.

Yeah.

You know, that piece is just a wonderful example of how you kind of have this expansive composition for orchestra that has this shape and this breadth, depth, if you will.

And so, you know, for me, you know, sort of harkening it and not quite copying these other composers, but listening and saying, how did they do something like this?

How did this masterful composer, you know, Wagner's music from Parsifal, just incredibly slow and drawn out.

I mean, that's the longest opera in the repertoire.

It's so long.

I think Meister Singer might be a little longer also.

My longer Parsonville is so long that oftentimes it's performed starting in the afternoon.

And then during the intermission you eat dinner.

It sounds like those like, cricket games.

Like, oh, yeah, you go through lunch, dinner, and then you play the next day too.

So there's this.

So that piece especially has this very long arc.

You know, we think about, you know, science fiction shows that have a long arc and storytelling.

Yeah.

You know, something like Babylon 5.

You know, once you Know, Star Trek, the Next Generation started to have long arc stories that took place over seasons and episodes.

And, you know, this for us, has that sort of feel, a lot of it, because a lot of it is sort of parallel.

There are sections that are sort of parallel.

Paralleling each other around a central event horizon.

Look at you two.

Yeah, so we're actually in the third part right now of the piece that we're hearing in the background.

This section is called Penumbra.

We went from First Light through Luminous into Penumbra, the middle of the piece.

And I'll give away a little bit of what we're planning on for next week's show.

The dead middle of the piece is called Event Horizon.

And the idea is that the music is going to be almost silent and the room is going to be pitch black for a short period of time.

So there's really a double arc.

You know, we're going to be coming up and then coming down to absolute zero and then coming back out.

And those two sides mirror each other, as Jerry was implying.

And so that structure is built into this backing track.

But on top of that, we're also going to be performing live.

Oh, wow.

And so we're bringing instruments, two different synthesizers.

I have a smaller one that also has some effects.

James has a larger keyboard, you know, more keys.

It's a Moog Muse.

Oh, beautiful.

And then tell them about what you did with your guitar.

Yeah, so I'm going to be playing guitar, but it's.

You're not going to hear the guitar.

It's a MIDI guitar.

So the guitar is actually triggering synthesizers.

So every string is triggering a different sound.

Some are choir, some are more organish.

So it's going to be interesting both visually and sonically, because people are going to be expecting to hear, oh, there's going to be some electric guitar, and then they hear a choir and.

Yeah, so.

So that's going to be fun.

Yeah.

And I also.

I love that you brought up, like, you know, that there's this moment of pause, there's this moment of silence, of darkness.

It's one of those feelings that is, you know, we.

In many ways and where we are right now in life, we are avoiding that in every way possible.

We are avoiding true darkness.

We avoid true silence.

We avoid those things with everything we have.

And, you know, those moments where you can really embrace that is when you feel the most different.

When the light changes.

Right.

Lift.

I can just like, you know, those moments, like, I'll just like, you know, in the Adirondacks where there's no lights and you see the stars with.

And the light that is so subtle in the way we live our everyday is so vibrant and hits you in a very different way because of the darkness.

Right.

The light feels more.

When you're thinking about when you were thinking about that moment and how did you want people to feel on the rejoin to that.

This is kind of how we're finishing.

Oh yeah.

When you're making that choice of what's the version of light we want people to feel as this turns, how are you thinking about?

Were you thinking about that emotionally?

Were you thinking about that?

Oh, very much so.

Very much that way.

And then technically as well, working with the person programmers there, especially with Kane and saying, you know, this is, this is our idea to have it be this absolute blackness at the event horizon and then this very gradual coming back to light.

As you know, it's been sort of programmed into not only the sonic part of what we're creating, but also the visual part.

Yeah.

It's a bit of a rebirth too.

Yeah.

Right.

You know, we, we've been fully immersed in the audio now for months and like every time we come into and out of this section it just gives me chills and I'm.

I'm not.

I'm hoping we don't give people chills.

I'm hoping we just give them time to think and time to be with the themselves.

It's not going to be easy.

Yeah, yeah.

People aren't used to doing that but hopefully, you know, we also want to give them pause because they're going to be seeing a lot of visual information for the first 20 minutes of this.

So it's a little bit of a mental break as well.

And time to think about what you just saw and then be ready for the next step.

That's beautiful.

Yeah.

They have access to these amazing, amazing high resolution images, you know, because of the fact that they're a planetarium, you know, and they're on these, they're like on a server.

They're so big.

Yeah.

And so to be able to just get right into all of these phenomenal, phenomenal pictures and just the astounding things that you're going to see and I think having it get gradually darker will sort of, I don't know, kind of ease them into this moment here.

Yeah, it's only a couple of minutes but you know, for folks it might be really different to just sit there and have it be absolutely black.

How they'll feel about that.

Yeah, well, if you want to experience, you know, something that might, you know, might you might sit with for a while after make sure you go to the Strassenberg Planetarium on either the 17th, 18th or 19th at 7:30.

Let's just get the plugs out for your other projects.

James, why don't you throw out where people can find you otherwise.

Oh just search James Tabby T A B B I and find my link tree.

I actually the day before this show starts I have a new single coming out that is totally not like this at all.

So it's going to be interesting that we'll be promote.

My record label will be promoting that the day before this happens and throughout.

But yeah, so that's my, my thing is that's the first single of a full length album that I did solo.

Oh beautiful.

My first solo project.

So I'm really excited about that.

Excited to have you over and talk about that.

Make sure you reach out and we'll do that another time.

Excellent.

And Jerry, where can people find you my next project?

You can find me looking up Synambient.

We also have a link tree for for our duo and it's S Y N M A M B I E N T But my next project is actually a little bit of photography.

The day before our dress rehearsal at the planetarium, I'm hopefully going to be teaching a course at the Flower City Arts center called the Situational Portrait.

Beautiful.

Go for a couple of weeks and I've had a chance to teach that a couple times there and it's been a really great experience.

So just trying to keep my fingers in all sorts of pots.

We never stop.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, you know, thanks for coming over.

Make sure you check out the other shows on the Lunch Order Podcast network by going to lunchadore.org we'll see you out on the fringe.

And in Luke of the Standard Outro we're going to leave this sit for a second.

So this has been a production of the Lunchador Podcast Network.

Sam.