Alvin Lucier - Vespers And Other Early Works (2002 compi, rec. 1961-2002)

A deep dive into the possibilities of sound, courtesy of Alvin Lucier.  This collection starts off in 1969, with the clicking and rattling of the sonar dolphin echolocation devices used in Vespers.  As spartan as this might be in its sound (and it probably has to be experienced live for full spatial effect), it's also strangely relaxing.  This is followed by Chambers, devised to integrate different types of environmental sound in odd ways.  First conceived in 1968, this was a new recording made in 2002 for this compilation.

North American Time Capsule is another vintage recording, of voices put through an early vocoder - when this was recorded in 1967, it originally formed part of the Extended Voices compilation overseen by Lucier.  Another 2002 recording follows, (Middletown) Memory Space, an update of 1970's (Hartford) Memory Space.  This is the first truly musical piece on the album, and follows Lucier's original instructions for the participants to take a walk through a city, record or memorize some ambient sound, then come back as a group and recreate that sound on an instrument, while Lucier conducts everyone in terms of timing.  That, and the closing low-frequency tape work Elegy For Albert Anastasia (recorded 1961 and remixed 1963), are also oddly calming, making this perhaps the weirdest chillout album ever made.

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG: Music On A Long Thin Wire

Alvin Lucier - Music On A Long Thin Wire (1980)

Double-album of minimal drone magnificence by composer and sound artist Alvin Lucier, b. 1931 in New Hampshire.  A founder member of the Sonic Arts Union collective along with David Behrman, Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley, a lot of Lucier's work had a strong performance/installation element.  This included amplifying his brainwaves; creating feedback by moving through a performance space; most famously, sitting in a room and looping his voice; and in the late 70s, using a physics/acoustics experiment for the basis of the work in today's post.

performance instructions by Lucier (click to enlarge for readability)

The performance setup is explained by Lucier in the instructions above - so just a quick recap:  A piano wire gets clamped to two tables at either end of a long room (on this recording, the rotunda of US Customs House, Bowling Green NYC, on 10th May 1979), each connected to an amplified sine wave oscillator.  A horseshoe magnet is placed over the wire at one end like a giant eBow, and the resulting oscillations are put through speakers round the room.

On four sides of an album, each from a different part of the day, the visual and participatory aspects of this are of course missing, but the sound is still unique and immersive.  Tiny variations in the drones occur throughout, sometimes breaking into ghostly shapes a la Soliloquy For Lilith, with every slight change in the room's atmosphere and the movements of observers.  If you're in the time and place to completely lose yourself in this for 75 minutes, prepare to be transported.  Drone hypnosis doesn't get much more minimal than this.

original LP cover

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Brandeis University Chamber Chorus - Extended Voices (1967)

This is from the same box set as the Pierre Boulez disc from last week, a great 10-CD collection of some of the greatest music of the 20th-century avant garde, from long-out-of-print CBS & RCA LPs spanning approximately 1964-1974.  One of the best £12 I spent last year.

Extended Voices was originally released in 1967, with The Brandeis University Chamber Chorus performing pieces by six avant-garde composers under the direction/sonic manipulation of composer Alvin Lucier.  All of these recordings are worth taking in for their sheer uniqueness and groundbreaking use of sound and technology, making Extended Voices an effective album experience that fascinates throughout.

After an okay start (there's much better Pauline Oliveros works out there to discover), the two long pieces on Side One are particularly mindblowing, with scraps of speech and vocalisation flying around everywhere and being mangled by the electronic treatments. On Side Two, Robert Ashley's 'She Was A Visitor' is the epilogue to a rarely-performed opera-of-sorts, which is really worth reading up on in context.  The two brief Morton Feldman pieces that close out Extended Voices are worth the entry price as well, being hauntingly produced by Lucier for this release.

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