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Sferics (Lovely, 1988) contains
Sferics (1980), a sound installation for ionospheric disturbances,
Sound On Paper (1985), for framed paper, loudspeakers and audio oscillator, and Music For Pure Waves, Bass Drums And Acoustic Pendulums (1985).
Crossings, Septet, In Memoriam / Ridenour (Lovely, 1990) contains
In Memoriam Jon Higgins (1985), for clarinet and pure wave oscillator,
Septet For Three Winds, Four Strings And Pure Wave Oscillator (1985),
Crossings (1984), for small orchestra and pure wave oscillator.
Clocker for Amplified Clock (Lovely, 1994) contains the first recording
of Clocker (1978), live electronics for performer with galvanic skin response sensor, digital delay system and amplified clock.
The electrical current generated by the system (ultimately, by the skin of
the "performer") causes polyrhythmic patterns of dissonance, which are then
coupled with the ticking of the clock. Lucier mixes and warps the sounds of
both so as to produce a continuum of discrete events,
which also stands as a metaphysical meditation on the passage of time and what
it does to the human body.
Panorama (Lovely, 1997) contains
Wind Shadows (1994), for trombone playing along pure wave oscillators,
Music For Piano With One Or More Snare Drums (1992),
Music For Piano With Amplified Sonorous Vessels (1991),
that relies on the resonances picked up by microphones placed inside
wine glasses, sea shells, pots and cups which are in turn placed inside
a piano,
and
Panorama (1993) for trombone and piano (trombone drones represent the mountains, whereas piano patterns represent peaks).
40 Rooms (Iear Studios, 1998) documents a 1996 installation for electroacoustic quintet.
Silver Streetcar For The Orchestra (Algen, 1998) contains the 1988 composition for amplified triangle.
Theme (Lovely, 1999) contains
Theme (1994) for voices and sonorous vessels,
Music For Gamelan Instruments, Microphones, Amplifiers And Loudspeakers (1994),
and
Music For Piano With Magnetic Strings (1996).
Still Lives (Lovely, 2001) contains three compositions for solo string
instrument (twice a piano and once a koto) resonating with a pure-wave oscillator:
Still Lives (25:10), eight vignettes that virtually bridge minimalism
and futurism,
Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Pure Wave Oscillators (16:31),
that follows two drones with no overtones as they move away from a pitch and
then return to it (while the piano sorts of sets the pace by playing their note
over and over again),
and especially On The Carpet Of Leaves Illuminated By The Moon (11:46),
where the koto releases languid and ethereal gasps from one semitone above the
electronic drone to one semitone below it.
The effect is unusually lyrical and haunting.
Navigations for Strings; Small Waves (Mode, 2003)
contains the 1992 string quartet and the 1997 piece for string quartet, trombone and piano, 2 dancers with 6 partially filled water containers.
Vespers (New World, 2002) collects early works. While interesting
for historical purposes, these are largely pointless recordings, because
half of them are not deterministic works (each performance is different)
and because the other half are mainly about the performance space (which your
stereo cannot reproduce).
The earliest is Elegy For Albert Anastasia (1963), a poem of musique concrete that predates the foundation of the Sonic Arts Union, and predates Lucier's
aesthetic maniesto Music For Solo Performer (1965). The sounds produced here are deliberately low, so low that one can hardly hear them; the point being
that we often don't "hear" things that are actually quite relevant (a reference
also implied in the ironic title, an "elegy" to the mafia boss who was shot
in a barber chair because he didn't "hear" what was going to happen to him
although the rumour was out there).
North American Time Capsule (1967) employs a vocoder to produce
a stream of grotesque alien-sounding voices (curiously similar to the voices
devised ten years later in Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind").
Chambers (1968) is musique concrete at its most literal,
an exploration/collage of environmental sounds (voices) that are electronically processed to lose their original quality until they become abstract noise.
Vespers (1969) is more a psychological experiment than a musical
composition, but it shows how Lucier came to be obsessed with the performance
space. The piece is a dialogue between sonar devices and the acoustics of the room, and the listeners "are", in a sense, the object of that dialogue:
the listeners are guided like bats in a dark room by the
frantic clicks that bounce around the performance space, and slowly
build an "image" of it; the point being that we are used to perceive music
in front of us (thus removing the performance space from the equation) but
not all around us (which would make the performance space the real protagonist).
This is interesting but, needless to say, impossible to reproduce on record,
so one wonders what we are supposed to do with this series of meaningless
clicks that our stereo projects exactly like the traditional performer
that Lucier was trying to remove.
(Middletown) Memory Space (1970) is a chamber work of a new kind, since
it is scored for any number of performers, and the performers are free to
produce pretty much any sound,
as long as they do not interact among themselves and as long as those sounds
are somehow related to sounds their heard in the city.
This recording employs shakuhachi, koto, accordion, piano and guitar.
This album is only for collectors. These theories make for interesting
reading, not for interested listening.
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(Translation by/ Tradotto da xxx)
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