Album DescriptionDesert Winds is a series of six compositions based on the field recordings made in the Wendover/Great Salt Lake Desert Region on the Utah/Nevada border. As a sound artist who utilizes field recordings, I initially was concerned about the high desert winds causing technical difficulties for me. However, I soon discovered that the desert wind was one of the most interesting assets to me in my quest for finding interesting objects/sites to record. The sounds recorded were all produced by the wind. Scott Smallwood is a sound artist, composer, and performer whose work spans a wide range of music interests. As sCAUGHT and half of the duo Evidence, his music treads the line between improvised ambient textures and beat-oriented music utilizing unique sound sources. As part of the Nyquist trio, half of a duo with Curtis Bahn, and an improvising musician in the free music scene, he performs on the extended Trinidadian steel pan with live electronics. And as an ambient composer of textured compositions utilizing field recordings, he has created a number of projects of which Desert Winds is the most recent. Smallwood?s music has been presented in numerous venues, including the Knitting Factory, the Kitchen, and Galapagos in NYC; the Tremont Theater, Boston Museum, and Mobius in Boston; the CEAIT Festival at CalArts; ICMCs in Hong Kong and Havana, Cuba; the Sound Practice conference and the MAXIS Festival in the UK, among others. He is also a concert organizer, and is currently the director of the Impulse Response experimental music series in Troy, NY. He currently teaches computer music on the faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he serves as the Technical Director of the iEAR Studios.