Alvin Lucier

Pogus is absolutely delighted to offer this new release by Alvin Lucier, three of which are previously unrecorded. The overwhelming feeling that comes from Still and Moving Lines, a new Pogus disc featuring four compositions by Alvin Lucier performed by the Australian new music ensemble Decibel, is that it is an exercise in listening. It invites you to explore the world sonically beyond the immediate aural experiences normally presented to you. By challenging and subverting listening conventions, these pieces of music open up minds and ears to push the listener into deeper realms of sonic perception.
'Ever Present '(2002), the only work offered here that has been recorded before is for flute, saxophone, and piano with slow sweep pure wave oscillator and is considered by many to be Lucier's most musical work. 'Carbon Copies' (1989) is for saxophone, piano, flute and playback; the work investigates musicians imitating their environments. 'Hands' (1994) is for organ with four players. The performers use their hands to subtly alter the harmonics produced from the pipes of an organ. 'Shelter' (1967) is for vibration pickups, amplification system and enclosed space and finds Lucier offering the sounds of outside a performance space. All these works as always are amazing examples of Alvin Lucier's fertile mind and exploring, experimental sensibility. One of the true originals.

Alvin Lucier was born in 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire. He was educated in Nashua public and parochial schools, the Portsmouth Abbey School, Yale, and Brandeis and spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship. Lucier has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. His recent works include a series of sound installations and works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra in which, by means of close tunings with pure tones, sound waves are caused to spin through space. Decibel are world leaders in the integration of acoustic instruments and electronics, pioneering electronic score formats, including the Decibel Scoreplayer App, incorporating mobile score formats and networked coordination performance environments. The ensemble has collaborated with composers such as Werner Dafeldecker, Agostino Di Scipio, Alvin Curran, David Toop, Marina Rosenfeld, Lionel Marchetti, Andreas Weixler and Johannes S. Sistermanns and worked with iconic Australian composers Jon Rose, Alan Lamb, Ross Bolleter, Warren Burt, Eric Griswold and Anthony Pateras. Decibel have contributed the Australian premieres of works by Fausto Romitelli, Tristan Murail, Alvin Lucier, Peter Ablinger, Mauricio Kagel and have toured monograph concerts dedicated to Alvin Lucier and John Cage.