I love listening. It is one of the only spaces where you can be still and moved at the same time. — Nayyirah Waheed — Tuesday October 9th — —

“What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.” Greil Marcus — Tuesday October 9th — —

The idea is to die young as late as possible. — Ashley Montagu — Tuesday October 9th — —

Cleartones Organic

Last year I was fortunate enough to play a little role in the birth of Cleartones – the elegant, hand made minimalist ringtones and notification tones – by my good friend Hugo Verweij. Today he released the next level: ‘Cleartones Organic’. A set of wonderful ringtones and notifications, all recorded on acoustic instruments like metal bells, glass bowls, marimba and vibraphone. I can’t say the first set of ‘Classic Cleartones’ aren’t good, but these are just so much better!

As Hugo explained: “After a successful start I wanted to take the Cleartones project to the next level. It became clear that people actually like having clean and unobtrusive ringtones, but how to create new Cleartones without having it sound too similar to the ones I already made? To really set the new Cleartones apart from the original ones which were created using electronically generated sounds, I decided to record sets of solely acoustic sounds. Bells, chimes, woodblocks, vibraphone and marimba’s. And what is a better place to find sounds like that than a studio of a professional percussionist?”

“So I asked Marijn Korff de Gidts to spend some time with me and my recording gear. His studio is filled with percussion instruments. We recorded everything that fits into the category ‘clear, elegant, simple, pleasant’, and is suitable to be used as a ringtone or a notification tone for text messages, voicemail or email: glass bowls, glockenspiel, Tibetan bells, even an Indonesian gamelan as shown in the pictures above. I decided only to do a little editing on the material to keep it as pure as possible and preserve the character of the sounds. This resulted in a beautiful new pack of minimalist ringtones: Cleartones Organic.”

The only question that remains is when the Cleartones will be pre-installed on all the new iPhones…