“Rain Cycle ranges from quirky, weird and wild to deeply poetic and meditative. And every sound is created by the human voice.” – Denver Westword

RAIN CYCLE was originally inspired by composer and writer Divya Maus’ longing for the rainy season in drought-ridden Los Angeles. The seemingly interminable days of summer in Los Angeles, followed by the dreaded wildfire season exacerbated by the Santa Ana winds, inspire a yearning for rain in native Angelinos– come February, we wait and pray that we will get rain.
In its subsequent installation in Denver, Colorado’s Cheesman Park, the meaning of this choral sound installation has shifted to embody the summer thunderstorms that shake houses with their force, blind citizens with a sudden downpour, and then clear in mere minutes to startling sunlight. Where in Los Angeles, RAIN CYCLE captured the slow moving of an almost five month weather cycle, in Colorado, it evokes instead the passing of a single hour on a summer afternoon.

RAIN CYCLE is built around four central choral movements:
Cloud Cover (featuring soloist Marisa Esposito), Tempest, Rainfall (featuring soloist Frank Hobbs), and Spring.
Surrounding these four choral movements are sound bubbles in which the eight virtuosic singers of the LA Choral Lab mimic the calls of bird, the humming of hornets, the roar of leaf blowers, the reverberations of telephone wires above the park, and the buzzing of flies. Each individual singer’s vocalizations are overlapped in specific locations– the sweeping wind surrounding the choral movement Tempest, the nest of hornets installed over a tree on the south end of the park, the flies buzzing around a garbage can by the playground…

This sound installation also comes with worksheets for children and students to interact with the soundwalk: a scavenger hunt worksheet for children ages 4-10, and a more reflective, interactive worksheet for students age 11+.