Benjamin Purper
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On a recent foggy morning, composer and winemaker Brook Munro stood perfectly still next to a row of grapevines, listening to a chorus of birds and insects. He likes to tune into the sounds of the vineyard early, well before any visitors show up to the tasting room at the Claiborne and Churchill Winery in San Luis Obispo’s Edna Valley.
Munro is keenly aware of the sounds of the winemaking process — as both a lifelong musician and a professional winemaker. He spent years figuring out how to combine these two passions with his debut album “Harvest in Twelve Parts,” which draws on sounds he recorded from the wine harvest.
“One of my favorite things to do is to record unique sounds or ordinary sounds and manipulate them — bend them to my will, so to speak,” said Munro, who’s toured with a rock band called “The Mighty Fine” and scored several indie films. “I’ve recorded everything from kitchen sinks to toothbrushes to the sound of cars.”
In 2021, Munro — who’s worked as a manager at Claiborne and Churchill for 15 years — had an idea: to record the sounds of the vineyard during harvest season, one of the busiest and most vibrant parts of the winemaking process.
“The artistry of winemaking and music-making are quite similar. There [are] a lot of inputs and a lot of variables that are controlled and some that are not controlled,” Munro said. “This idea just kind of struck me: what would it sound like if I could express winemaking from a musical perspective?”
Munro took a field recorder and captured sounds like bird calls, the twang of a trellis wire, and the splash of rainwater hitting the grapes. He then manipulated those sounds in his music software to create virtual “instruments” he could arrange into melodies and harmonies.
“At the time, I didn’t know what the album would sound like,” he said. “I knew that it would be experimental to a degree. I didn’t know how much. I thought perhaps I [could] make the whole album literally just the sounds from the winery.”
With two harvests’ worth of sounds, Munro got to work arranging them into music. Some of the tracks on “Harvest in Twelve Parts” have clear melodies, while others feature more of an ambient, experimental soundscape. Munro also decided to blend the recordings with traditional instruments like cello and guitar to create a unique musical experience.
But it’s not just experimentation for its own sake — for Munro, every song has a story, even if there aren’t any words.
“I wanted it to be a sonic journey through harvest,” he said. “And to do so, it had to go through kind of an arc in a way…The first track is a prologue, the final track is an epilogue, and everything else is the journey.”
Each of the album’s twelve tracks has distinct sounds and moods. Tracks like “Jubilaüm” and “Under the Harvest Sky” feature recordings of birds and have a tranquil quality, while some tracks like “What We Overcome” use rain sounds to create a dire, intense feel. Only one track, “Harvest for Orchestra,” was recorded exclusively on traditional instruments — by the Cape Town Philharmonic — with no processed vineyard sounds.
On other tracks, it can be hard to tell the difference between traditional instruments and field recordings that Munro digitally processed to sound like instruments. “Macerated Lines,” for example, begins with a xylophone-like sound that Munro created by striking wine glasses with a soft mallet.
“Through some digital processing, I could then create this really cool sound, almost like a toy piano,” he said. “Probably 75 percent of the album is all recorded on nontraditional instruments, but a lot of them are layered in such a way where you could hear a sound, and it’s actually four different winery sounds creating one tone.”
Munro said he hopes “Harvest in Twelve Parts” inspires others to embrace experimentation — in both music and wine.
“If someone else took their experiences into the vineyard, into the cellar, into the barrel room, and they crafted something musically or artistically, it would be beautiful, and it wouldn’t sound like me — it would sound like them,” he said. “Music and wine, the end result is always going to be very much an extension of the person who created it.”