Alvin Lucier

Lucky restock, very last copies available. Illuminated by the Moon is the most generous document of Alvin Lucier's late years: four LPs, a CD and a 120-page book recorded over the three days of the festival the Zurich University of the Arts held for his 85th birthday in October 2016. Lucier himself performs the two pieces that made his name, and the rest of the set spans fifty years of work, from the classics to premieres written in his eighties, most of it otherwise absent from his discography.

Lucier, who died in 2021, spent his life treating sound as a physical event rather than a vehicle for melody: rooms, wires, brain waves and the beating between two close frequencies were his material. Here I Am Sitting in a Room (1970) reduces his own voice, re-recorded again and again, to the resonances of the hall, while Music for Solo Performer (1965), the first piece to use amplified alpha waves, sets drums and cymbals shaking with nothing but his brain activity. Charles Curtis plays the cello piece that bears his name, long tones against slowly sweeping oscillators, and leads the four cellists of One Arm Bandits, the hour-long work that fills the CD. Joan La Barbara gives the first performance of Double Rainbow for voice and oscillator, and in Nothing Is Real (Strawberry Fields Forever) a Beatles fragment is played back inside a teapot, whose lid opens and closes the resonance. The chamber works Braid, Two Circles and Step, Slide and Sustain show how far a few sustained pitches can go, and Hanover brings in the Ever Present Orchestra, with Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O'Malley and Gary Schmalzl on electric guitars in place of the three banjos of the score. The music moves slowly and quietly, yet the effect is physical: tones rub against each other until the air of the room seems to vibrate, and the dry humour that ran through Lucier's whole career is never far away.

Signed edition: one of the copies signed by Alvin Lucier, numbered 1 to 17 out of 500. Four 180 gram LPs and a CD in black card sleeves, with a 120-page book full of previously unseen images.