Arcane Candy

Alvin Lucier is a composer of experimental music who has been working since the 1960s in a solo setting, and with such cutting edge groups as the Sonic Arts Union, which also claimed as members fellow ’60s electronic music pioneers (and your basic, everyday legends) Robert Ashley, David Behrman and Gordon Mumma. Lucier mainly works with materials and processes that investigate acoustic phenomena and human perception of sound. He has been teaching at Wesleyan University since 1970.

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Alvin Curran has been working since the 1960s as both a composer and a performer of improvised music. In 1966, he was a founding member of the legendary Musica Elettronica Viva, who along with England’s AMM, were one of the very first free improv groups. Originally recorded in 1984–but not released on CD until 2004–Maritime Rites is a collection of masterful works for live instruments and field recordings from the United States Eastern seaboard. During “World Music,” which opens disc one, Leo Smith burps, blats, coughs up shrill spittles and holds up some held tones high into the sky on the appropriately named seal horn in the company of foghorns and boat horns.

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James Tenney (1934-2006) was one of the more important yet obscure composers of the second half of the 20th Century. He studied most notably under Carl Ruggles and Edgard Varèse at places like The Juillard School of Music, Bennington College (B.A. 1958) and the University of Illinois (M.A. 1961) It was at U.I. where he attended what were probably the first courses in electronic music anywhere, instructed by Lejaren Hiller. Right after that, Tenney, along with Max Matthews at Bell Telephone Laboratories, was the first composer to significantly employ the computer as a composition aid and sound generator. He was also co-founder and conductor of the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble in NYC from 1963 to 1970 and performed in the ensembles of Harry Partch, John Cage, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Tenney is also the author of numerous books and articles on acoustics, perception and form in music. He taught at The Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, California Institute of the Arts, University of California and York University in Toronto.

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Morton Feldman-influenced fence post-minimal composer and Cal Arts graduate John Luther Adams has been at it since the mid 1970s. Composed in 1998 as a memorial to his mother, who passed away in 1996, and released in 2003, In the White Silence cycles through numerous sections of austere, minimal, orchestral music. From simple, melodic string plucks accompanied by pristine, sparkling vibes, bells and celesta to lyrical violin passges to the most fogged forehead drones imaginable, I can think of no better gift from son to mom. So, why don’t you buy a copy of In the White Silence for yourself? It’s the gift that keeps on giving!

Label: New World Records Catalog Number: 80600-2 Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 19 Total Time: 75:15 Country: United States Released: 2003 More: Discogs, Forced Exposure, Last.FM, Official, Wikipedia

Text ©2010 Arcane Candy

Within this silly little realm we call reality, Terry Riley is simply one of the most awesome musicians to ever play a note. Every time he touches an instrument or opens his mouth to sing, magic fills the air. Terry came to prominence in the 1960s as an early minimalist with his groundbreaking compostion, In C, and lesser-known but even greater works like Reed Streams, All Night Flight and Olson III. He has remained very active in the music scene throughout every decade since.

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Born in 1939, Barbara Kolb is an American composer of challenging classical music. Case in point: The title track of this ancient 1992 CD serves up a nearly 20-minute helping of dissonant avant garde classical chamber orchestra music layered with quiet electronic drones via computer generated tape. Here and there, the listener encounters starts and stops; and abrupt, urgent, repetitive rhythms with a playful xylophone that frolicks around the sound field without a care in the world. Can you say, “Sustained dreamworld?” The second track, “Extremes,” ironically simplifies the proceedings with a sprightly flute and droning cello. Not too far along, both get all melodic on your ass, then seque out onto a dead end street full of odd, cantankerous riffs.

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Five Works For Voices, Instruments and Electronics is a CD released in early 2002 courtesy of our fine, feathered friends at New World Records. The works by Kenneth Gaburo contained on it span from 1957 to 1974, and offer much goodness for lovers of strange and gargled sound waves of the vintage variety. “Antiphony IV (Poised)” (1967) is another in a long line of avant-garde classical / electronic crossovers from the later classic era—pitting lone vocal sounds in the left channel and dark, electronic swirls in the right against (or with) a lot of quirky instrumental blat in the soft, chewy center. In “String Quartet In One Movement” (1956), “Sometimes all four instruments make one line, sometimes they split into four completely distinct entities; most often they are balanced into exquisitely formed hierarchies, with one held note on one instrument being temporarily in the foreground—only to be immediately replaced by a fragment of another line in another instrument as the focus of attention. It’s almost as if the music were woven, rather than composed—each line existing both as an object on its own and as part of a larger making of musical gestures.”

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Ikon and Other Early Works is a much welcome CD of voice-based electronic works spanning the years 1972-1976 from this composer who got his start with Vladimir Ussachevsky at Columbia in the ’50s and went on to be influenced by New York minimalists in the ’60s. The eight-and-a-half minutes of “Cortez” offer vast, shimmering fabrics composed entirely of many layers of the treated voice of Snee McCaig reciting his chilling poem of the same name: “Whenever the world is supposed to end, it does / within a month and a day of the end the Aztecs were expecting, came Cortez / white flowers blossoming in each cold spring wind, bends their heads.” An eerie, otherwordly effect of transcendent forehead hover is constantly maintained, complimenting the words perfectly.

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This CD is full to the brim with a continent-sized ball of piano music of maze-like complexity written in 1989 by experimental composer Larry Polansky. Very difficult to play but lovely to hear, the piece is often far more melodic and song-like than Larry’s experimental output—which typically veers toward the austere and conceptual. “Wait a minute (ptuey!)—hadduh spit out muh chewin’ ‘baccer. Heh-heh. Muh great granny Maw Kettle wuz jess mutterin’ tuh me sumthin’ about this here Puhlanskuh feller offerin’ up a set of variations on the harmonization of the folk song ‘Lonesome Road’ by thuh great ‘mericuhn wimmin’ composer Ruth Crawford (1901-1953). Now I might not know so much about that, so y’all will have tuh listen up here to wut muh good buddy and fellow music ‘pree-shee-ater Kyle Gann gots to say.”—Festus McRib “This [is a] great amalgam of Ivesian pianism, gamelan patterns, jazz-tinged harmonies and folk song. Its size and grandeur hark back to a pianistic outsider tradition of sui generis works, the cloud-hidden mountain peaks of the piano repertoire.”—Kyle Gann

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Gamelan Galak Tika is a nice merger of traditional Balinese-style percussion with two Western instruments: “Amok!” for gamelan, double bass and sampler and “Tire Fire” for gamelan and electric guitars. Gamelan Galak Tika (“Galak” means wild, fierce or passionate, but when combined with “Tika” it merely puns on Battlestar Galactica) is a seven-person ensemble based at MIT who managed to learn this complex music by rote…no peaking at a score, ever. In “Amok!” the “sampler eats up the whole ensemble and spits it out again.” “Listen, for example, to the start of part two, where the sampler tranposes the gamelan’s gong to different pitches. As the beats expand and contract, this single-note time-keeping instrument becomes a melody instrument, a virtual forest of gongs. It is as if a single gong were hung in a hall of digital mirrors. Soon afterward, the sampler introduces nine-note chord clusters, as though all of the keys of a Balinese metallophone were played at once. In these and many other ways, the sampler lets Ziporyn construct ‘an impossible musical landscape.’”–Marc Perlman

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