Founded in 1978, Lovely Music is one of the longest-lived and most distinctive independent labels active in the recording and promotion of new American music. According to label founder
Mimi Johnson
, the label is
'dedicated to releasing the best in avant-garde and experimental music, from electronics and computer music to new opera and extended vocal techniques.'
Placing emphasis on the artist's intent, Lovely Music recordings are always composer-supervised and produced.
Foremost among the artists represented in the Lovely catalog is composer
Robert Ashley
; almost all of Ashley's most important works have been released by the label, including the monumental electronic opera for television,
Perfect Lives
(which has been called the
'most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s'
). Other composers have released some of their most important achievements on the label as well:
David Behrman
's, "Leapday Night,"
William Duckworth
's "Time Curve Preludes,"
Alvin Lucier
's "I am sitting in a room" and "Music on a Long Thin Wire," and
Meredith Monk
's "Key" all rank among the more exceptional recordings to be found in the Lovely catalog.
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LBR 49178BR
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2023 upgraded and remastered version of Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives -- in 1080P full HD video format, pressed on double-Blu-Ray (175 minutes; stereo; Region 0/worldwide). Perfect Lives has been called "the most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s." At its center is the hypnotic voice of Robert Ashley. His continuous song narrates the events of the story and describes a 1980s update of the mythology of smalltown America. Perfect Lives is populated with myriad characters revolving around two musicians -- "R", the singer of myth and legend, and his friend, Buddy, "The World's Greatest Piano Player". They have come to a small town in the Midwest to entertain at the Perfect Lives Lounge. As Robert Ashley describes in the opera synopsis, "they fall in with two locals to commit the perfect crime, a metaphor for something philosophical: in this case, to remove a sizable about of money from The Bank for one day (and one day only) and let the whole world know that it was missing." The eloping couple, Ed and Gwyn, the old people at the home, the sheriff and his wife (Will and Ida) who finally unravel the mystery, and Isolde who watches the celebration of the changing of the light at sundown from the doorway of her mother's house are some of the characters who journey through the seven episodes of the opera. Derived from a colloquial idiom, Perfect Lives transforms familiar material into an elaborate metaphor for the rebirth of the human soul. It has been called a comic opera about reincarnation. Remastered in 2022/23. 1080P HD Blu-Ray 49178 (two discs); 16-page booklet includes Robert Ashley's synopsis plus articles on the music by Kyle Gann and the video by Charles Hagen. Personnel: Robert Ashley- solo voice; Jill Kroesen and David Van Tieghem - chorus; "Blue" Gene Tyranny - keyboards; David Van Tieghem - non-keyboard percussion; Peter Gordon - music producer; John Sanborn - television director; Paul Shorr - soundtrack producer; Dean Winkler - image processing and videotape editor.
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LCD 5004CD
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Robert Ashley's eL/Aficionado is a group of scenes from the life of an "agent". The scenes are a kind of "debriefing" to a jury of Interrogators, in which the Interrogators (chorus) challenge the Agent (soloist) in various forms of musical dialogue. The mood of the opera owes much to our fascination with espionage and with the character of those people who lead double lives. The opera was performed many times between 1987 and 1993, and Lovely Music released a recording of the opera in 1994 (LCD 1004CD). This new studio recording features the cast of the 2021 production (October 21-23 at Roulette, Brooklyn), with mezzo soprano, Kayleigh Butcher, taking over the role formerly inhabited by baritone Thomas Buckner. Recorded at Robert Ashley's studio in July 2021. Orchestration by Robert Ashley and Tom Hamilton. Recorded and mixed by Tom Hamilton. Produced by Tom Hamilton and Mimi Johnson. Personnel/Credits: Music and Libretto by Robert Ashley; Kayleigh Butcher - The Agent; Brian McCorkle - Interrogator No. 1; Bonnie Lander - Interrogator No. 2; Paul Pinto - Interrogator No. 3.
"As labyrinthine as a Robbe-Grillet novel, as pithy as a Pinter play, eL/Aficionado comprises a series of debriefing sessions between a secret agent and his three interrogators. For 70 minutes the work sustains an atmosphere of uneasy calm brilliantly: misty, microtonal electronics provide a sometimes barely audible backdrop to the vocal parts. But don't confuse this with ambient; Ashley's music requires your full attention to appreciate the subtle timbres of his unique sound world... This is another riveting work by one of the world's leading composers of experimental opera." --Chris Blackford, The Wire (1995)
"Enigmatic, cryptic, wonderfully mysterious, eL/ Aficionado has a story line and narrative structure, as do Ashley's previous operas. Though the characters hail from a parallel universe, familiar and alien. The music is austere, simple, even minimalistic, yet utterly compelling. The New York Times was dead-on in proclaiming Ashley 'opera's James Joyce.'" --Dean Suzuki, Wired, 1995
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LCD 5003CD
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This new release from Lovely Music features Robert Ashley's famous ensemble, the "band" who interpreted his work for 20 years, from 1992 through 2012. They included Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Marghreta Cordero, Tom Hamilton, Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara, and Amy X Neuburg. This recording was made at the Hebbel Theater, Berlin on May 12, 1995. The opera was also heard live at the Festival d'Avignon, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Musica Strasbourg, and Site Santa Fe. Foreign Experiences is one of the opera tetralogy that Ashley wrote in the early 1990s, following Perfect Lives (LCD 4917CD/LDVD 4917DVD) and Atalanta (Act of God) (LCD 3301CD, LCD 3303CD). He would give it the overall title (also the name of one of the component operas) Now Eleanor's Idea. These four operas would follow the stories of some of the characters who populated Perfect Lives a decade earlier. We met Don last year when Lovely Music released a CD of a new Ashley "band" performing Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) (LCD 5002CD) at the Kitchen, New York. In Foreign Experiences "Don gets a job at a small college in the southwest. Once there, against all expectations, everything goes wrong. He loses his family and friends, he loses his car, he fears that he will lose his mind." He comes to believe that he has been given a mission, to learn about premonitions and he embarks on a journey to find the wise man who will give him priceless information. Linda thinks he plan is foolish; Don thinks he has no choice. But is the opera really "about" Don and Linda? "Opera likes to simplify and enlarge its characters to make them fit grand themes. Mr. Ashley goes in the opposite direction and arrives at the cosmos just as easily. Mundane chitchat about good eating habits or car repair turns to metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, not to mention psychiatry, before we know it." -- Bernard Holland, The New York Times (November 21, 1994) The live recording was made by Tom Hamilton and Cas Boumans, and this release has been edited mixed by Tom Hamilton. A slipcase includes a jewel case with a four-page folder, and a 96-page booklet of the full libretto.
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LML 1002LP
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Repressed. Lovely Music present a reissue of Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing, originally released as an LP by Lovely Music in 1979. Over the course of Robert Ashley's career his preoccupation with language and the voice took many forms. He became known in his librettos as a wonderful, funny, moving writer. But with Automatic Writing he examines language at a very "primitive" level -- the human impulse make sounds to express his inner state, whether it be regret, embarrassment, fear, or happiness -- even though there is no one else to listen. Talking to oneself.
Personnel: Voices - Robert Ashley and Mimi Johnson; Electronics and Polymoog - Robert Ashley; Words: Robert Ashley; Translation: Monsa Norberg; Silhouette: William Farley. The switching circuit was designed and built by Paul DeMarinis. Recorded, produced, and mixed by Robert Ashley at the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College (Oakland), the American Cultural Center (Paris), and Mastertone Recording Studios (New York). This reissue was remastered and cut, from the original reel-to-reel tape, by Scott Hull, Masterdisk (New York). Manufactured at Record Technology Inc/RTI (California). 180 gram vinyl; Stoughton Old Style sleeve. Includes an insert with a transcription of the words, and the Automatic Writing notes Ashley wrote for Lovely's 1996 CD (that included "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon" and "She Was A Visitor").
"On Automatic Writing, Robert Ashley composes under the influence of his 'involuntary speech.' (In his liner notes, Ashley revealed that he suffered from 'a mild form of Tourette's.') The piece starts quietly, with scraps of Ashley's mild, tremulous voice arranged next to more fluid French translations and barely-there touches of Moog. After Ashley's phrases lengthen enough to encompass sense-making phrases, a bass-register groove briefly appears, vanishes, then returns. Few pieces so quiet have proven as captivating; many that intend to be equally startling can't capture Ashley's range of surprises." --Seth Colter Walls, from Pitchfork's "Fifty Best Ambient Albums of All Time"
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LCD 5002CD
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Like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) is an allegory for an individual's self-realization. The opera takes its imagery from the history of the Jews --beginning with their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and ending 500 years later in the United States. Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) was first conceived as a recording for Nonesuch Records (1991). Ashley followed with three other operas, making up a quartet or tetralogy under the name Now Eleanor's Idea (LCD 1009CD), and all four operas were performed often during the first half of the 1990s.
The opera was revived in 2018-19, with a new cast: Gelsey Bell as Linda; Brian McCorkle as Don, Mr. Payne, and Companion; Paul Pinto as Junior, Jr.; Aliza Simons as Now Eleanor; Dave Ruder as The Doctor; Amirtha Kidambi as Mr. Payne's Mother; Robert Ashley (on tape) as Narrator I; Amirtha Kidambi and Aliza Simons as Narrator II. Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) was presented by the Kitchen, February 7th through 16th, 2019. Live Sound and Processing: Tom Hamilton. Live cast recording by Eric Sherman and Tom Hamilton. CD mixed by Tom Hamilton.
"Improvement is engrossing because Ashley was one of the finest American prose writers of the 20th century and his writing was made thrilling Thursday night by the beauty of the performance. These new artists incorporate Ashley wholly in their musical experience, taking the work beyond the objective presentation of the opera's means, style, and form. Thursday night they were as characterful and plainly human as one will experience on the opera stage. Gelsey Bell was exceptional, the warm glow of her voice a colorful contrast with Ashley's pleasantly parched midwestern twang. She expressed vocally Linda's mix of befuddlement and optimism, her sense that her own life is a mystery -- and through some imperceptible means she outlined Linda's aging while always sounding the same. Hamilton's digital reconstruction of the original audio was superb, true to the source material and with the subtlety Ashley requires, while also having ample open space, depth, and vividness. He was just as much a member of the ensemble as the artists on stage, and just as vital to the human feeling that grew throughout the performance to a gentle but moving coda at the end of the evening." --George Grella, New York Classical Review, February 8, 2019
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LCD 1903CD
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2024 restock on CD; 1990 release. Commissioned by Mabou Mines, the experimental theater group from New York, for their interpretation of King Lear, Pauline Oliveros's Crone Music is a subtle and haunting electronic music endeavor. Interfacing an abundance of digital delay processors, reverb effects, and foot pedals to bend pitches from piercing to twisted, sonorous tones, with her one-of-a-kind expanded accordion, Oliveros produces rich, eerie textures. Personnel: Pauline Oliveros -solo accordion; Panaiotis - processing and mixing.
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Lovely Music present a reissue of David Behrman's On the Other Ocean, originally issued as one of Lovely Music's first six releases in 1978. This newly-mastered LP is a must-have for Behrman aficionados or a perfect introduction to his work.
"I've been engaged for many years in an exploration of ways to make music and intermedia installations in which software and electronic devices interact with human performers. I've wanted to make works that have personalities, which remain distinct and recognizable, yet are open to surprising changes that can come about when they are performed or exhibited." --David Behrman
"Remarkable achievements on a purely technological level. Behrman's carefully programmed Kim-I system listens to tones played by the live performers, instantly analyzes the situation, and responds by playing back electronic tones of its own. This is undoubtedly the first time that humans and electronic sound equipment have communicated with one another with high degrees of spontaneity and intelligence on both ends of the wire. But the music that results is perhaps even more remarkable. Subtle, sustained, serene, sophisticated, super." --Tom Johnson, The Village Voice, Dec. 18, 1978
Recorded at the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College, Oakland, California, Sept. 18, 1977, and at the Electronic Music Studio, State University of New York at Albany, June 9, 1977. Personnel: On the Other Ocean: David Behrman - electronics; Maggi Payne - flute; Arthur Stidfole - bassoon Figure in a Clearing: David Behrman - electronics; David Gibson - cello. 180 gram vinyl, Stoughton Old Style sleeve.
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LML 1001LP
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Repressed; Lovely Music presents a reissue of Robert Ashley's Private Parts, originally issued in 1978. This newly mastered LP release is a must-have for aficionados as well as a perfect introductory work to Ashley's oeuvre. Among Lovely Music's first six releases, it came to be known as "the yellow record". No one had ever heard anything like it; Ashley presented an unvarnished exposition of the inner workings of a man's mind. And on the other side, those of a woman. These two episodes were the foundation for Ashley's seven-part opera, Perfect Lives (LCD 4917CD, 2017), which was performed by his ensemble throughout the 1980s and was completed for television broadcast by Britain's Channel Four. New arrangements of Perfect Lives, notably Varispeed's site-specific version, continue to intrigue and enchant. Recorded at the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College, Oakland, California, July 1977, produced by Ashley. Personnel: Robert Ashley - voice; "Blue" Gene Tyranny - keyboards; Kris - tablas. 180 gram vinyl, Stoughton Old Style sleeve, includes libretto.
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LCD 1002CD
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2023 restock; 1996 release. Automatic Writing compiles three early Robert Ashley works from 1967-79 -- some of his most experimental works. Composed in recorded form over a period of five years, "Automatic Writing", originally issued on Lovely Music in 1979, is the result of Robert Ashley's fascination with involuntary speech. He recorded and analyzed the repeated lines of his own mantra and extracted four musical characters. The result is a quiet, early form of ambient music. The piece rather famously formed the basis for Nurse With Wound's A Missing Sense (1997). Steven Stapleton's commentary on the recording: "A Missing Sense was originally conceived as a private tape to accompany my taking of LSD. When in that particular state, Robert Ashley's 'Automatic Writing' was the only music I could actually experience without feeling claustrophobic and paranoid. We played it endlessly; it seemed to become part of the room, perfectly blending with the late night city ambiance and the 'breathing' of the building." The piece features the voices of Ashley and Mimi Johnson, with electronics and Polymoog backing, with a switching circuit designed and built by Paul DeMarinis. "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon" and "She Was A Visitor" are excerpts from an opera entitled "That Morning Thing", composed in 1966-67 as a result of Ashley's impulse to express something about the suicides of three friends. "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon", originally issued in 1968, is a woman's description of a sexual experience. Ashley attempts "to demonstrate the dichotomy between the rational-whatever can be explained in words-and its opposite-which is not irrational or a-rational, but which cannot be explained in words." The lead voice performed by Cynthia Liddell, the processed back-up chorus, the recurring bell tone, and the pervading tape hiss, create an unsettling mood. "She Was a Visitor" was originally issued on the electronic compilation Extended Voices in 1967. It is another form of description, intended to be understood as a form of rumor. The chorus is divided into groups, each headed by a leader. A lone speaker repeats the title sentence throughout. The separate phonemes of this sentence are picked up freely by the group leaders and are relayed to the group members, who sustain them softly and for the duration of one natural breath. The time lag produces a staggered, chant-like effect, with the sounds moving outward from the nearest performer to the farthest. Booklet notes by Robert Ashley.
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LCD 3081CD
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2002 release. The DownTown Ensemble was formed in 1983 by co-directors, Daniel Goode and William Hellermann. The Ensemble has several points of focus: music for open (unspecified) instrumentation, emerging composers, commissions, graphic scores, ritual/intermedia music, and large ensemble works. While the Ensemble has a consistent core of players, performances always involve a variety of other artists. There have been over fifty such collaborations since the group's inception. Downtown Only presents four of them. Features works by: Daniel Goode, William Hellerman, Mary Jane Leach, and Peter Zummo.
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LCD 1065CD
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1994 release. A realization of "Blue" Gene Tyranny's How to Discover Music In the Sounds of Your Daily Life, a procedural score for recording and composing with environmental sounds. Eclectic, flowing music alternately gesturing toward impressionism and minimalism. Personnel: "Blue" Gene Tyranny - acoustic and electronic keyboards, field and studio recording, electronic transforms; Timothy Buckley - accordion in "The CBCD Intro"; the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music, featuring Robert Hughes as conductor.
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LCD 1064CD
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1990 release. Some of "Blue" Gene Tyranny's greatest keyboard works/performances can be found here on Free Delivery. The Nocturne With and Without Memory was commissioned by Lois Svard and has also been recorded by her for Lovely Music (LCD 3051CD, 1994). Sunrise or Sunset in Texas is from Philip Makanna's film The Crack of Dawn (1983). Personnel: "Blue" Gene Tyranny - acoustic and electronic keyboards; Timothy Buckley - accordion; Joel Ryan - computer analysis.
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LCD 1066CD
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2003 release. A CD of works for solo piano from "Blue" Gene Tyranny. Thirty-five of the 36 songs in this "audio storyboard" are individually built around an atmospheric primary chord, counter-rhythms, and a body of notes which creates a potential melody that unfolds bit by bit. The Driver's Son is scored for a narrator, a chorus of five people creating fifteen voices, an electronically modified orchestra of folk and concert instruments and parts for a lighting designer and a live video animator known as "The Guide". The realization for electro-magnetically stimulated piano (1993) heard here employs feedback circuit devices, designed by composer David Meschter, that initiate subtle sustaining tones when placed on the strings. The slowly appearing, ethereal sounds in this piece are "artificial harmonics" that resonate high in the piano strings when one chord is silently depressed and another chord of the same form but a half-step lower is loudly struck and quickly released. 36 of these, interlaced with 36 "natural harmonics", were recorded and then the initial loud attack was removed with computer editing. This procedure left a bed of subtle, non-corporeal sounds that seem to lie on the surface of the strings like a cloud, and allowed listeners to hear sounds that normally are only perceived by the pianist sitting a few feet away from the strings.
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LCD 1019CD
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2018 repress forthcoming...1994 release. For amplified clock, performer with galvanic skin response sensor, and digital delay system. Alvin Lucier - performer; recorded by Nicolas Collins. Through the means of a galvanic skin response sensor driving a digital delay on a miked clock, Lucier creates the illusions of time expanding and contracting, and of a room that is changing in size.
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LCD 1018CD
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1990 release. Three works for classical instruments and oscillators (1982-85). Alvin Lucier explains the process: "The three works on this compact disk explore interference phenomena between sound waves. When two or more closely tuned tones are sounded, their oscillations periodically coincide to produce audible beats of sound. The speed of the beating depends upon the distances between the pitches of the sounds. The further apart, the faster the beating; at unison, no beating occurs. Furthermore, under certain conditions, the beats may be heard to spin around the room....." Personnel: Alvin Lucier - electronics; Thomas Ridenour - clarinet; The New World Consort of Wesleyan University.
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LCD 1013CD
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2024 restock; originally released by Lovely Music in 1981. In this fascinating exploration of acoustical phenomena, Alvin Lucier slips from the domain of language to that of music in the course of 40 minutes and 32 repetitions of a simple paragraph of text. In I Am Sitting In A Room, several sentences of recorded speech are simultaneously played back into a room and re-recorded there many times. As the repetitive process continues, those sounds common to the original spoken statement and those implied by the structural dimensions of the room are reinforced. The others are gradually eliminated. The space acts as a filter; the speech is transformed into pure sound. All the recorded segments are spliced together in the order in which they were made and constitute the work. I Am Sitting In A Room was composed in 1970 and was first performed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City that same year. A second version was made in 1972 to accompany the dance, Dune, performed by the Viola Farber Dance Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Since that time, numerous versions of this composition have been realized in various ways by other musicians, including a Swedish radio broadcast version. This recording was made by Alvin Lucier on October 29th and 31st, 1980, in the living room of his home in Middletown, CT. The material was recorded on a Nagra tape recorder with an Electro-Voice 635 dynamic microphone and played back on one channel of a Revox A77 tape recorder, Dynaco amplifier, and a KLH Model Six loudspeaker. It consists of thirty-two generations of Alvin Lucier's speech and was made expressly for Lovely Music, Ltd.
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LCD 1011CD
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2022 restock; 1992 release. First released on Lovely Music in 1980. A 50-foot length of taut wire passes through the poles of a large magnet and is driven by an oscillator; the vibrations of the wire are miked at either end, amplified, and broadcast in stereo. The thin wire is set vibrating four times at four different frequencies; what results is not the low drone one might expect from a long, vibrating wire, but a complexity of evocative, ethereal chords. Music On A Long Thin Wire is a classic example of Alvin Lucier's investigations into the physics of sound and the sonic properties of natural processes.
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LCD 1012CD
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2021 restock; 1997 release. A gorgeous recording of works for trombone and piano, transformed by Alvin Lucier's electronics and oscillators. Wind Shadows (1994), Music for Piano with One or More Snare Drums (1990), and Panorama (1993) -- were written for the Swiss musicians Roland Dahinden and Hildegard Kleeb, who play them on this CD. Also included: Music for Piano with Amplified Sonorous Vessels (1990), which was originally written for Margaret Leng Tan.
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LCD 5013CD
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2009 release. Alvin Lucier on Sferics and Music For Solo Performer: "Sferics is the shortened term for atmospherics, natural radio-frequency emissions in the ionosphere, caused by electromagnetic energy radiated from nearby or distant lightning. . . . My interest in sferics goes back to 1967, when I discovered in the Brandeis University Library a disc recording of ionospheric sounds by astrophysicist Millett Morgan of Dartmouth College. I experimented with this material, processing it in various ways -- filtering, narrow band amplifying and phase-shifting -- but I was unhappy with the idea of altering natural sounds and uneasy about using someone else's material for my own purposes. I wanted to have the experience of listening to these sounds in real time and collecting them for myself. When Pauline Oliveros invited me to visit the music department at the University of California at San Diego a year later, I proposed a whistler recording project. Despite two weeks of extending antenna wire across most of the La Jolla landscape and wrestling with homemade battery-operated radio receivers, Pauline and I had nothing to show for our efforts. . . . Sferics was recorded by the composer on August 27, 1981, in Church Park, Colorado. The sound material was collected continuously from midnight to dawn with a pair of homemade antennas and a stereo cassette tape recorder. At regular intervals the antennas were repositioned in order to explore the directivity of the propagated signals and to shift the stereo field." "Music For Solo Performer was first performed on May 5, 1965 at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, with the encouragement and participation of John Cage. I sat on a landing between the two floors of the museum, electrodes attached to my scalp. The mono output of the alpha amplifiers was routed to the inputs of eight home stereo amplifiers, the outputs of which were sent to 16 loudspeaker-percussion pairs deployed around the museum. During the course of the 40-minute performance Cage randomly raised and lowered the stereo amplifiers' volume controls channeling the alpha signal to various instruments around the room. . . . This recording of Music For Solo Performer was produced under the supervision of Wesleyan professor of music Ron Kuivila with the assistance of graduate students Ivan Naranjo and Phillip Schulze and undergraduate Forrest Leslie, at the Wesleyan University Experimental Music Studio, on December 8 and 9, 2007."
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LCD 1015CD
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2002 release. Double CD release of Alvin Lucier's four-part work, initiated in 1972 and recorded as presented here in 1983-84 and 2001. This reissues two long-out-of-print LPs on Lovely Music, released in 1983 and 1984, with four added parts (the strings) released for the first time. A series of mostly solo instrument works for the likes of: clarinet, marimba, viola, voice, xylophone, violin, flute, glockenspiel, cello, horn, and vibraphone. Performed by: Thomas Ridenour, William Winant, Dan Panner, Rebecca Armstrong, Conrad Harris, Susan Palma, Gregory Hesslink, and James de Corsey. An absolute masterpiece of "interference sound".
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LCD 5012CD
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2019 repress. 2001 release. Three works for pure waves and instruments from Alvin Lucier. Lucier has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. His recent works include a series of sound installations and works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra in which, by means of close tunings with pure tones, sound waves are caused to spin through space. Personnel: Marilyn Nonken - piano on Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Pure Wave Oscillators; Ryuko Mizutani - koto on "On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon"; Joseph Kubera - piano on Still Lives. "I count Alvin Lucier's Still Lives among the most beautiful recordings I've ever heard. Like Janácek, Lucier's art stands alone despite the air of detached cool it shares with Lovely Music's catalog. Lucier's deceptively simple aesthetic is in fact delightfully complex in the manner in which it reveals horizons. In this release, the composer has purely acoustic sounds (single piano tones, less often chords, and briefly, koto) interacting with electronically created, similarly uncomplicated sounds. The magic -- and I choose that word carefully -- occurs in the mingling. Lucier takes his time, and so should the listener. I can think of little music better suited to the recording medium. The disc's eponym, in eight parts, serves as a showpiece for the varieties of soul-touching experience Lucier's seemingly perfunctory systems permit. The composer's good notes tell the story. Particular congratulations to Tom Hamilton (a fine composer in his own right) for a wonderfully intimate sound." --Mike Silverton, "Golden Ear Awards 2002", The Absolute Sound (Mike Silverton is the editor of LaFolia.com)
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LCD 5011CD
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1999 release. Theme features three works from Alvin Lucier. Music for Piano with Magnetic Strings is a work in which the strings of a piano sound by themselves. Several EBows (small electromagnets used primarily with electric guitars) which would cause the piano strings to vibrate and sound are placed on the strings of the piano. The pianist works from a prose score which describes the process and suggests she freely position and reposition five EBows on the piano strings, creating strands of sounds of varying density and texture. Theme features a poem of John Ashbery's set to music. Lucier didn't want to violate the flow of the words of the poem by fragmentation or any other cut-up method. The stanzas seemed musical enough just as they were and he wanted the audience to hear the poem more or less in its pristine state, so, working intuitively and by ear, he wrote out the poem for four readers in the order it was written, repeating words and phrases, overlapping and superimposing them in various ways. To "set" the poem, he inserted microphones into the mouths of various vessels, including a small milk bottle, a sea shell, a vase and an empty ostrich egg, to pick up the words as they were sounding inside the vessels. Theme is performed by: Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jacqueline Humbert, and Joan La Barbara. For Music for Gamelan Instruments, Microphones, Amplifiers and Loudspeakers, Lucier wanted to make a work for Javanese gamelan, but was wary of using someone else's music in his own work. It wasn't until he started imagining the bowl-shaped bonangs of the gamelan orchestra more as resonant chambers to be sounded than objects to be struck, that Lucier felt he could make a work for gamelan that he could call his own. During the performance four players place bonangs of various sizes over microphones, creating feedback, the pitch of which is determined by the shape and size of the bowl and the resonant characteristics of the room. Three gender players strike the bars on their metallaphones, searching for the pitches of the feedback strands. Since it is virtually impossible that a strand of feedback will match exactly a pitch on any fixed-pitch instruments, audible beats - bumps of sound which occur as sound waves coincide - occur. The closer the tuning, the slower the beating.
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LCD 2083CD
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2023 restock; 2008 release. An aural tracing of the Danube, interleaved with the memories and reflections of its people. 59 sites and 13 interviews, from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. Includes large fold-out map, with translations of the interviews. 167 minutes, recorded and mixed by Annea Lockwood.
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LCD 2081CD
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2023 restock; 2003 release. Originally released on Lovely Music in 1989. An aural journey from the source of the river, in the high peak area of the Adirondacks, downstream to the Lower Bay and the Atlantic Ocean; Annea Lockwood traces the course of the Hudson through on-site recordings of its flow at 15 separate locations. Annea Lockwood has recorded rivers in many countries to explore the special state of mind and body which the sounds of moving water create when one listens intently to the complex mesh of rhythms and pitches. The listener will find that each stretch of the Hudson has its own sonic texture, formed by the terrain, varying according to the weather, the season and downstream, the human environment whose sounds are intimately woven into the river's sounds.
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LCD 2082CD
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2023 restock; 1999 release. Two of Annea Lockwood's dramatic works dealing with issues of spiritual wholeness. Duende (1997), about shamanic transformation, is written with and performed by Thomas Buckner. Lockwood selected sounds which reminded her of certain vocal transformations heard in recordings of shamanic ceremonies. In such singing, changes in the voice mirror and also help to bring about changes in the singer's mind and awareness. Within an improvisational framework, Buckner explores the possibility of change of state through such transformations, moving through three stages: preparation, a first flight, and a final flight, in which he moves beyond the self he knows. Thus, Duende is a not a prepared, performed work, but a vehicle for experience. Buckner is partnered by a tape drawn from the sounds of the cuica (an African and South American instrument), a large glass gong and other glass sounds, wind, a Cameroonian rattle, a kea (New Zealand mountain parrot), and a bullroarer. Delta Run (1979-81) is an expression of the thoughts and experiences of a sculptor who talked with Lockwood just over a day before he died in 1979, aged thirty. He knew that he was dying and wanted to communicate his perceptions of death as something "only natural, you know - now is my time", seeing this piece as a form of continuing creativity now that sculpture was out of reach. Interwoven with his voice are wind, water, ambient sounds from the hospice where they talked, and some of the ordinary sounds of daily living, embodying the sense that dying is a part of living, not separate from it, and that in dying we are incorporated back into the elements from which we emanate.
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