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The Iannis Xenakis compilation entitled Electronic Music totally wrecked me. It spans his whole career, from tape compositions at the GRM in the 50s through to actual honest to god digital composition in the early 90s. "Concrete PH" is a gorgeous percolating soundfield comprised of spliced snippets of recordings of embers popping in a fire. There are gorgeous sheet-metal rending sounds, swarming glissandi, and clanging bells a-plenty. I think I caught at least one part that made me think for a second, damn but this Greek cat's funky.
Another recent purchase that has really interested me is Alvin Lucier's I am Sitting in a Room. It is a recording of Lucier reading the text
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of r-r-r-rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity nnnnnot so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to s-s-smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
As every successive generation of the text was played back on the monitor and rerecorded, the acoustic space of the room (in the case of the 1980 recording linked to above, the living room of his house in Connecticut) emphasizes certain tones of Luciers' speech, and obscures others. 30 minutes into it, all that can be heard clearly of the original text are the ghosts of sibilant consonants hissing through a dense, ringing soundfield. The very slow disintegration of mundane speech into the gorgeous howling of the end over 32 repetitions is riveting. It sounds like listenting to the sound of a microphone feeding back sliced into wafers, so each successive stage of the noise can be heard in turn. |
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