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CD
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LCD 3001CD
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2024 restock. Joan La Barbara begins Sound Paintings with a scream that pushes you into an unusual world of vocal sound. Her virtuoso singing style, developed over a 20-year period, can be heard on this disc, which combines some of her earlier works with more recent compositions. She takes her extended techniques, which include multi-phonics, overtone singing, and glottal clicks, and orchestrates them in layered soundscape compositions using from eight to sixteen tracks of material.
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2CD
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LCD 3003CD
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2022 restock. Collection of early works and Joan La Barbara's first vocal compositions, originally released on LPs in the 1970s and early 1980s on her own Wizard Records. La Barbara says, "One of my earliest pieces, 'Hear What I Feel', was a self-exploratory, sensory-deprivation experimental work, designed to help me discover new sounds, delve into psychological aspects, as well as communicate with the audience on a pre-verbal level of awareness. After spending an hour in isolation with my eyes taped shut and not touching anything with my hands, I was led our into the performance space where my assistant had placed a variety of substances in six small glass dishes. As I touched the material, I tried to give an immediate vocal response to what I felt both emotionally and physically, without the benefit of visual information. I expected the shock of bringing a solitary state of mind into the heightened awareness of a performance situation to intensify my experience, and the poignancy of my 'prepared' state to affect the audience. The sounds are presented here in their raw state; it is truly an experimental work with no intentional musical implications or designs. 'Voice Piece: One-Note Internal Resonance Investigation' explores the color spectrum of a single pitch. 'Circular Song' was inspired by the circular breathing technique of horn players. 'Des Accords pour Teeny', an exploration of multi-phonic technique or choral singing, was dedicated to Teeny Duchamp. In much of my early work I dealt with sound as a physical presence, sculpting it, building up layers in complex constructions, letting the flow of thought and the visualization of sonic gestures direct my studio art. Voice Is The Original Instrument was both a statement of purpose and a manifesto as, through various experiments and explorations, I tried to rediscover the basic function of the voice as the first means of expression as well as to release untapped sonic material. As I gave my classically trained voice its freedom, letting it direct me toward new places and ideas, I developed what was a unique vocabulary and used those sounds to score an orchestra of layered voices."
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LP
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ALE 006LP
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Tapesongs (1977) is the second of two crucial Joan La Barbara reissues on Arc Light Editions, following Voice Is The Original Instrument (1976) (ALE 005LP, 2016). Joan La Barbara is a composer, performer, sound artist and actor, renowned for her unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques, which have influenced generations of composers and singers. This reissue is presented in full collaboration with La Barbara. Tapesongs makes use of early electronics, and multi-tracked tape techniques to manipulate La Barbara's signature extended vocal techniques. It includes two essential pieces: John Cage's Solo For Voice 45 and a burning take-down of Cathy Berberian in "Cathing". In 1977, La Barbara was living in NYC, playing concerts internationally and performing regularly with John Cage, who she described as a mentor. "I began working with John Cage in 1976 and we had done several performances of his 'Solo for Voice 45' from Song Books in concert," says Joan. "Cage determined the 13-minute version for this version, overlaying all 18-pages of the score so that one hears the entire work in layers. Hearing it again after all these years is wonderful and brings back many memories." "Cathing" uses a recording of a radio interview Cathy Berberian did during the intermission of one of La Barbara's concerts at the Holland Festival: "She basically trashed those of us doing extended vocal techniques," she says. "She used the interview for her own self-promotion rather than taking on the mantle of the 'mother' of vocal explorations. Rather tragic, I thought. So I created a work exploring extended vocal techniques and manipulating her spoken voice." "Thunder" is for six tympani and voice, using electronic devices (the same as used in "Vocal Extensions" from Voice Is The Original Instrument), and explores patterns through instruments and real-time composition with two jazz improvising musicians. The original artwork is an incredible shot of Joan buried to her neck in reel -to-reel tape. Remastered from original tapes by Rashad Becker. Kraftliner outer sleeve & art paper inner sleeve.
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LP
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ALE 005LP
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Voice Is The Original Instrument was the first record released by Joan La Barbara in 1976 on Wizard Records. This is the first time the original LP, with artwork, has been made available again. It has since become iconic as one of the initial examples of extended vocal techniques in experimental music. The human voice is the only instrument on the recordings. The works on Voice is the Original Instrument were some of Joan's earliest compositions, researching the possibilities of the voice, in two rigorous études, "Circular Song" and "Voice Piece: One-Note Internal Resonance Investigation", and the more free-form "Vocal Extensions", which uses live electronic processing. "My reason for producing the LP was to get my music out to the world beyond NYC and the major cities in which I was playing concerts," she says. "At that time, Carla Bley and Michael Mantler had started JCOA/New Music Distribution Service which handled small independent labels, so there were quite a few artists in the NYC area who were producing their own albums and distributing them through that service." Just out of college and living in a Soho loft in New York, Joan began playing shows in New York with jazz and rock musicians, and with those in the new music scene. "I did commercials, which, strangely enough, led me to Steve Reich," she says. "A composer I was working with, Michael Sahl hired me to do some radio commercials and suggested me to Reich who was looking for singers who could imitate instruments, which was something I had been working on for some time and was part of my exploration of the voice. I worked with Reich on the development of "Drumming", imitating the marimba."
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CD
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NW 80545CD
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"Composer/performer Joan La Barbara has been an influential figure in experimental music since the early 1970s. She has devoted her career to the exploration of the human voice as a multi-faced instrument. ShamanSong features three premieres of vintage La Barbara 'sound paintings' of pensive beauty and spiritual resonance. ShamanSong is a concert suite comprised of selected excerpts from a film score. 'Plaintive descending chords of soft hammers striking an ancient Balinese gamelan instrument, tar and dumbek, shakuhachi, music box tines, rainstick and African rattles all are blended with sighs and whispers, lamentation and ululations, calls, cries, lullabies and vocal winds to weave a strange mystery...'Rothko' is a series of sound paintings designed to reflect the mood, texture and emotion of Mark Rothko's final paintings for this very special chapel -- dark, intense, but with an inner light and moving figures that are sometimes heard, sometimes hidden.'"
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