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.

Wind Shadows is a double-CD collection released in 2005 containing mostly minimal works from the late 1980s and ’90s that joins live instruments with the humble oscillator to investigate a series of beat frequencies. Opening disc one, “In Memoriam Stuart Marshall” pits a bass clarinet against a low-pitched pure wave oscillator. Belting out some super low-pitched drones, the two switch back and forth between matching unison and going slightly off kilter to produce uncanny beating effects. Next, a clarinet, trombone, violin, cello and double bass blat out single notes into a digital reverb unit set to various lengths to mimic “40 Rooms.” Similar to track one, “In Memoriam Jon Higgins” features a slow sweep pure wave oscillator that proceeds from the lowest to the highest notes of an accompanying clarinet for some slow and fast beatings. “Letters” shuts down disc one with a bunch of invigorating dissonant piano pound sprinkled with woozy clarinet, violin and cello for quite a homely slice of ear candy.

“Q” opens up disc two with an array of deep, resonant, electronic drones that sound like a fleet of taxi cabs crossing a suspension bridge while a squadron of bombers soars overhead. In the five parts of “A Tribute to James Tenney,” a double bass and an oscillator move together from high-pitched to super low-pitched string scraping and beating drones. Meanwhile, over in the “Bar Lazy J,” a clarinet and trombone engage in some held tones and silences. A cello, piano and viola offer up some sublime, shrill, microtonal drones during “Fideliotrio,” which sounds kind of like a cross between Lois Vierk’s “Go Guitars” and a Tony Conrad screechfest. Finally, the title track closes the whole set with another trombone and oscillator beat. I reccomend Wind Shadows for anyone into subtle sonic investigations that result in droneworks that are much more somber than usual.

Label: New World Records Catalog Number: 80628-2 Format: 2-CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: Disc 1: 4, Disc 2: 9 Total Time: Disc 1: 59:29, Disc 2: 78:12 Country: United States Released: 2005 More: Discogs, Forced Exposure, Last FM, Lovely Music, Official, Perfect Sound Forever, Scaruffi, Ubu Web, Wikipedia

Text ©2010 Arcane Candy

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.

Pauline Oliveros melds her barely audible ornate accordion runs on “Rattlesnake Mountain” as the only female lighthouse keeper in the U.S. speaks above a phalanx of whistle buoys, three-tone gongs and foghorns. Back down on the “Coastline,” Steve Lacy laces his rather trad-sounding melodic sax through layers of overdubbed foghorns while some Coast Guard guys tell stories. Clark Coolidge reads poetry over foghorns in “Mine” while his dad Arlan tells stories. Dense layers of spoken word is the result. “Improvisation” finds Joseph Celli offering up some high-pitched cries and shrill wheedling on reeds, English horn and mukha veena as plovers, loons, peepers, frogs and a bell buoy sing along. Over on the “Soft Shoulder,” Jon Gibson avoids blocking traffic as he shuts down disc one with a little melodic soprano sax built up into layers of Terry Riley-like delay with foghorns, and splashing water.

Malcom Goldstein busts open disc two with some incredibly fervent, minimal violin sawing and raspy string scraping during “From Center of Rainbow, Sounding.” An old salt joins in to tell stories as a gaggle of bell buoys, foghorns, seals and eider ducks go off in the background. This track is simply music at its best. The second track in this collection to brandish the title “Improvisation” finds George Lewis producing weird animal cries on trombone as Anthony Braxton repeatedly recites five words and Captain Ken Black gives a tour of the Shore Village Museum in Rockland, Maine. Joining them are a deep, two-tone foghorn, a whistle buoy, and various and sundry motor boats, deep animal moans, oinks and squawks. This track and the following one are easily the most experimental-sounding of the bunch.

Next in line, John Cage recites the five words “Ice, Dew, Crew, Food, Ape,” which is also the title of this piece. His words are layered with each other and a really deep foghorn, a ship horn, a lighthouse horn and a mysterious, distant quivering sound. The grand finale, “Maritime Rites,” was composed by Alvin Curran all by himself. This 23-minute epic starts out sparse with bell buoys, a chorus of ship horns, splashing water, and ever-thickening foghorns mixed all over the stereo field. Further along, Alvin’s chanting really sets the piece aloft, as the Brooklyn Bridge offers up a set of insect drones and a realm of wispy ambience takes over. A myriad of horns eventually returns as Bill Bonyun plays bandoneon and sings a sea shanty called “Rolling Home,” which perfectly draws to a close this insanely evocative album. It’s no wonder that Maritime Rites was one of my top picks back in 2004.

Label: New World Records Catalog Number: 80625-2 Format: 2-CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: Disc 1: 12, Disc 2: 8 Total Time: Disc 1: 74:36, Disc 2: 64:04 Country: United States Released: 2004 More: Discogs, Forced Exposure, Last FM, New Albion, Official, Other Minds, Wikipedia

Text ©2010 Arcane Candy

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.

Released as a double-CD set in 2004, the Postal Pieces–most of which make their recorded debut here–were composed by Tenney in the late 1960s and early ’70s. They “are a remarkable series of eleven short works printed on postcards. Each card contains a complete if minimally stated work to be performed by instrumentalists. These pieces elucidate to a large degree some of Tenney’s bedrock compositional ideas. Each is a kind of meditation on acoustics, form, or hyper-attention to a single performance gesture.”–Larry Polansky. “Maximusic” opens disc one with a gentle cloud of quiet cymbal wash that floats right in front of your face for several minutes–only to be suddenly and rudely interrupted by a loud rhythmic attack on drums and percussion, which ends with a final gong hit then reverts back to the opening atmosphere. “Swell Piece” picks up where the first track left off with some string and woodwind drones complete with stop-and-start silences. If you’re a 1950s teenager in a malt shop, you might refer to it as a really swell piece. “A Rose is a Rose is a Round” offers the only real sonic deviation from the rest of the album, as it brandishes layers of repetitive, acapella, melodic singing.

“Beast” continues the collection’s moody atmosphere with a cave-deep contrabass drone. This track really is a beast! “Swell Piece #2″ brandishes rising and falling and stopping and starting trombone tones, while “Having Never Written a Note For Percussion” starts out quietly with a gong wash that builds to super loud, raging frenzy then mellows out again. “Koan” features a woozy, ascending, minimal viola rhythm, followed by “For Percussion Perhaps, or…(night), which closes the disc with more quiet, ebbing drones via trombone and electronics. “Swell Piece #3″ openes up disc two with some extended trombone and held vocals approprately dedicated to La Monte Young. As its title suggests, “Cellogram” saws away with an array of dizzy cellos that rise and fall like the sun, or a roller coaster. The 43-minute and deeply meditative “August Harp” closes out disc two with a seemingly never-ending set of single notes plucked from a harp. Just as important as Tenney’s groundbreaking 1960s computer music, which can be heard on Selected Works 1961-1969, the Postal Pieces are a previously unknown monster minimal artifact ripe for discovery.

Label: New World Records Catalog Number: 80612-2 Format: 2-CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: Disc 1: 8, Disc 2: 3 Total Time: Disc 1: 71:45, Disc 2: 60:50 Country: United States Released: 2004 Related Artists: Larry Polansky More: Discogs, Forced Exposure, Frog Peak, Post Classic, Some Assembly Required, Wikipedia

Text ©2010 Arcane Candy

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.

On Assassin Reverie, a CD released in 2005, Terry teams up with a sax outfit called the ARTE Quartet, and the results are somehow refined, riotous and raucous all at the same time. First up is a three-section, 20-minute piece called “Uncle Jard.” Part one opens the disc with a very pensive, meditative feeling, full of sax drones and the instantly recognizable presence of Terry, whose raga singing is as deep and resonant as his harpsichord playing. Part two veers in the opposite direction with an upbeat, honky-tonk feel that harks back to the early 1960s, when Terry played ragtime piano at a San Francisco saloon. Part three closes up “Uncle Jard” with a collection of sprightly, minimal sax riffs.

The title track is another sprawler that clocks in at 19 minutes. It starts out mellow with a lot of complex sax interplay that gradually rises into a keening climax, followed by an extended eight-minute noise breakdown full of screaming raspberry skronk, rhythmic echo pounding and sounds from the battlefield. After the violence subsides, a storm of skittering sax appears, then falls back into a mellow melody. I’ve never heard such chaotic music come from the mind of Terry Riley. Not surpsingly, it was composed in 2001, and was inspired by the events of September 11. Closing up the disc is “Tread on the Trail,” which hails from 1965, a year after the premiere of In C, and with its ever-looping, loping horns, it does indeed sound like a version of that piece for sax.

Label: New World Records Catalog Number: 80558-2 Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 5 Total Time: 48:17 Country: United States Released: 2005 More: The Cortical Foundation, Forced Exposure, Last.FM, Lovely Music, New Albion, Official, Other Minds, Wikipedia

Text ©2010 Arcane Candy

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.

Moving on to track three, we find “Chromatic Fantasy,” in which a narrator reads a surreal poem by Howard Stern, who is obsessed with a beautiful woman wearing a vibrant purple dress. Brandishing an amplified alto flute, oboe, soprano sax, electric guitar and vibes, this track takes an extended detour into The Twilight Zone. Looks like Barb saved the best for last. The final track, “Solitaire,” conjures up an expansive, mysterious space with deceptively simple ingredients: a lone, melodic piano and spooky vibes. Llike a chopped-up Chopin concerto from the 19th century, it floats effortlessly through the inky blackness of outer space deep inside your head. The dreamy soundworld of “Solitaire” is nothing short of an avant garde classical classic.

Label: New World Records Catalog Number: 80422-2 Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 4 Total Time: 53:03 Country: United States Released: 1992 More: Amazon, Amazings, Boosey and Hawkes, Discogs, Wikipedia

Text ©2010 Arcane Candy

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.”

“Mouthpiece: Sextet For Solo Trumpet” (1970) contains almost six minutes of rather humorous-sounding mouth farting, spitting, gurgling, popping, hissing…and even a little actual trumpet playing from Jack Logan. “Unlike most trumpet music, where the phoneme ‘t’ or ‘k’ is used to articulate the trumpet, here the trumpet is used as a filter for every phoneme the voice is capable of generating. Phonemes are spoken or sung through the trumpet, and sometimes they are used in playing to get other phonemes that result when processed through the trumpet as filter.” “Antiphony III (Pearl-White Moments)” is even more fried than its child, “Antiphony IV.” Austere, alien activities charge the air on a barren, lysergic world as electronically-altered, vocal soundscapes melt your face off. “Once again, a poem by Virginia Hommel provides the basis. Here, however, it is articlated contrapuntally, one word at a time, by both the chorus and the tape. Each word is heard—sometimes spoken, sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, sometimes electronically modified on the tape, in the order presented in the poem. As well as that, though, words are fragmented, displaced, referred to each other, and connected with each other, and text is painted with sound differently for each word.”

The best is saved for last on this CD, with “The Flow Of (U)” (1974)—a long web of cradling minimalism delivered via “one note sung by three singers for 23 minutes.” Barely (and very obscurely) released before in excerpt form on a Musicworks CD, this is the CD premiere of this entire piece, perfectly primed for your bedroom. Turn out the lights, lay down and close your eyes to allow another previously unknown monster of minimalism to billow throughout your room. P.S. The nice beating is thoroughly entrancing.

Label: New World Records Catalog Number: 80585-2 Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 5 Total Time: 66:32 Country: United States Released: 2002 More: Discogs, Forced Exposure, Last.FM, Official, Tokafi, Wikipedia

Text ©2003 Arcane Candy

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.

“Weather Report” is made of mesmerizing, effected tape loops from a Danish radio announcer and is very remeniscent of Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain.” “The Emperor’s Birthday” features straight-up interview sections which later merge into more tape loop mania. “Cries Upon the Mountains” includes Norwegian sheepherders, cowbells, and child’s voice “opening with a sixth and ending transformed electronically into a wraith that has always haunted me. She too was recorded off Norwegian radio, while the other sounds include the rustle of snow as Marshall trudged through on skis with a microphone hung from his neck.”–Edward Strickland “SUNG” refers to the Sung Dynasty and “is scored initially as a solo / duo recitative by painter Jan Hafstrom and dancer Margareta Asberg, after which the tape processes multiply their voices into a ghostly chorus as Marshall’s spectral bass appears with an English translation” of a most thoroughly zoned poem: “No flower without Earth / no Earth without space / no space without flower.”

“Sibelius In His Radio Corner” provides a spellbinding space of ghostly, echoey, electonic ambience inspired by a photo of the the composer Sibelius relaxing in an armchair, listening to his own works on the radio. “In his old age, Sibelius enjoyed pulling in distant broadcasts of his music off the shortwave. I imagined that with all the static and signal drift, some of these listening experiences might have been proleptically like a modern day electronically-processed kurzwellen piece.”–Ingram Marshall The title, and final, track is another foray into recognizable voices gradually transformed into slowed, looped atmospherics. This CD is a fine collection, definitely to be liked by anyone into the tape works of Terry Riley or Steve Reich.

Label: New World Records Catalog Number: 80577-2 Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 7 Total Time: 66:25 Country: United States Released: 2000 More: Blog Spot, Discogs, Epitonic, Last.FM, New Albion, Nonesuch, Perfect Sound Forever, Official, Other Minds, Wikipedia

Text ©2003 Arcane Candy

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

At well over an hour long (it even had to be trimmed down to fit on one CD), the seemingly endless variations of this tune can easily accompany any evening-long, shawl-wearin’, sofa-in-front-of-the-fireplace-sittin’-with-a-hot-cup-of-cocoa session you might ever be able to muster. The massive piece is loaded down with a whole ocean full of ear-bound coral, a vast plain packed with dense patches of briar, unexpectedly inverting on a dime—from jaunty romps to floating lyricism to dense atonality—all connected together in joyfully unpredictable ways. Once again, Larry Polansky blows the minds of folks all around his block. The whole shebang comes packaged with the usual eloquent and authoritative liner notes by Kyle Gann, which places Lonesome Road in the context of music history and tells the whole story in fascinating detail. Be sure to check out vague predecessors to this piece, such as: Charles Ives’ Sonata No. 2 For Piano,“Concord Mass., 1840-1980” CD on New World Records (80378-2); and Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated CD on New Albion (NALB 63).

Label: New World Records Catalog Number: 80566-2‏ Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 51 Total Time: Unknown Country: United States Released: 2001 More: Dartmouth, Forced Exposure, Frog Peak, Wikipedia

Text ©2003 Arcane Candy

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

During “Tire Fire,” the guitars ease in with an array of simple, sparse strums that are refreshingly “off” sounding from the relentless, shrill percussion drive. Fortunately, the guitars never do rock out too hard or drown out the gamelan instruments, even though things do start sounding pretty peppy and kinda “regular” in the last coupla minutes. Like I said before, it’s a nice merger impeccably played by a quite capable cast, unlike the loads of transnational corporate behemoths who are trying to quickly –and exponentially–merge themselves into God. Damn.

Label: New World Records Catalog Number: 80565-2 Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 2 Total Time: Unknown Country: United States Released: 2000 More: Discogs, MySpace, Official, Twitter, Wikipedia

Text ©2003 Arcane Candy