The Edison Effect: A Listener's Companion
A sound recording never preserves quite what it claims to preserve. Aspects are missing and alien elements introduced. On this CD there are many voices (from old records & wax cylinders), but always the surrounding noises draw the attention. Paul DeMarinis is a sound engineer who collaborated with several avantgarde composers, and then became an avantgarde composer himself. His compositions for speech, processed and synthesized by computers, such as Beneath the Numbered Sky, are collected on Mu…
Number Made Audible
*Original 1993 edition* Named in tribute to Fluxus-founder, the Maciunas Ensemble (Paul Panhuysen and three others) cross disciplines (art, music and science) with eas11 pieces that investigate invented instruments and recording techniques. Scored variously for groups of duochords (2 string monochords played with motorised rubber bands, hurdy-gurdy style), aluminium monochords, played with felt hammers, guitars with tails (all explained in the excellent booklet with pictures and background on al…
Music on a long thin wire
First released on Lovely Music in 1980, Music on a Long Thin Wire is a classic example of Alvin Lucier's investigations into the physics of sound and the sonic properties of natural processes. A 50-foot length of taut wire passes through the poles of a large magnet and is driven by an oscillator; the vibrations of the wire are miked at either end, amplified and broadcast in stereo. The thin wire is set vibrating four times at four different frequencies; what results is not the low drone one migh…
Maritime Rites
Featuring the foghorns and other maritime sounds of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and solo improvisations by John Cage, Joseph Celli, Clark Coolidge, Alvin Curran, Jon Gibson, Malcolm Goldstein, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, and Leo Smith "In the middle 1970s I began to formulate ideas and projects leading to the making of music outside the concert halls-often in large open and naturally beautiful sites. Ports, rivers, lakes, caves, quarries, fields, and woods, always ready sources of …
Hora Harmonica
"Hora Harmonica," realized in 1983 at the Pietro Grossi S 2F M (Studio di fonologia musicale di Firenze), is not a proper piece of music, but conceptual art inspired by the physics of sound. Albert Mayr proposes a harmonic clock, a model of non-linear time.. “When we slow down a sound many times, all the way below 15 cps approximately, we perceive as a series of discrete pulses. In a physical sense it remains a sound, but not for human perception. Try now to imagine an extremely slow 'sound' whe…