Dub Taylor

  "Lumière evolved over a period of three years from 1969 to 1972.I started by recording random sounds: Jets taking off at LAX, my girlfriend laughing and screaming, my cat Bartok biting a microphone, conversations, etc. I also sampled music, film soundtracks and TV and radio broadcasts. During this period I acquired the first self-contained portable synthesizer, the newly-designed ARP 2600. I began to envision an electronic and Musique Concrete piece combining various natural and processed sound recordings with synthesized sound into a suite of noise. In June of 1972 I did a preliminary version of elements of the piece. By October I was ready to put it all together. I set up all these reel to reel machines with tapes I had pre-recorded and plugged them into a mixing board, feeding stereo to a two-track master 15 IPS Revox A77 tape deck. My idea was to create a sound collage with form but without losing spontaneity and an element randomness. So I rehearsed my fade-ins and fade-outs and the starting and stopping of the various playback decks and when I was ready I went for it, 'playing' all these machines like a musical instrument in this mad moment of creation. In effect, Lumière was a 'live' performance. The only later additions were the silence gaps inserted near the end of the piece using pieces of blank leader tape."