Doug Aitken

Lightscape is a song cycle by the American artist Doug Aitken, and the musical source of one of his largest recent works. The songs came first. They grew out of improvised recording workshops with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and became the starting point for a feature film and a multiscreen installation co-commissioned by the Chorale and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The project premiered as a live-to-picture performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall on 16 November 2024, during the Noon to Midnight festival, moved to the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles as an installation with live music in early 2025, and opened at The Shed in New York in June 2026. The record gives the nine songs on their own, away from the images.

Aitken developed the compositions with Grant Gershon, the Chorale's artistic director and a Grammy-winning conductor, then worked with the producers Austin Meredith and Rodaidh McDonald to collage the sessions into finished arrangements. The writing relies on short, plain words and phrases repeated until they lose their literal sense, a method taken from minimalism, and the questions that run through the lyrics are who we are and where we are going. The sound moves between the intimacy of one exposed voice and the mass of a choir of more than fifty singers, and the voices are looped and broken up over synthetic textures and steady electronic pulses, so that the warmth of human breath sits on top of something mechanical and fast. Titles such as When I Move, Freeway and Sunset point to the setting of the film, which the Chorale describes as a picture of the West Coast heading into a quickly escalating technological future. At the Disney Hall premiere the choral songs were heard alongside music by minimalist composers including Philip Glass. Aitken has described the process as a bet on instinct: "take that energy of improvisation and see if you can make something new with it" (Wallpaper, 2025). At The Shed the film runs with a programme of live sets that opens with the Chorale itself.

Limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 180 gram blue vinyl and housed in a bespoke outer sleeve with high-gloss UV spot coating and the title and artist name embossed.