ok so favorite part of tonight's sf bjork show was the audition of hugh lecaine's 'dripsody' over the pa, and the audience screaming with wild, thunderous applause at the conclusion of the piece as it hits the low, sub bass notes. I'd never heard the piece played so fucking loud before, let alone to several thousand people. it sounded unbelievable.
that led directly into varese 'poeme', followed by 'cindy electronium'. I doubt it was a coincidence all the pieces can be found on he 'ohm' compilation, but not in sequence: a careful, beautiful playlist.
anyway, hugh lecaine's 'compositions and demonstrations' - I was frightened away from aquiring this disc for years due to the 'demonstrations' half of the title, assuming 'dripsody' was his shining moment. I was so, fucking, wrong. his disc is absolute proof of the fact that the composers most people publicly trumpet are simply the people who can formulate catchy promotional memes to be parroted by the loudest reviewers. don't sleep.
the bjork concert was quite wonderful in any case. v. happy night & party, but anyone talking lecaine go on ahead.
― jl (Jon L), Saturday, 9 August 2003 10:15 (twenty-two years ago)
'Dripsody' is fun. Somehow I only just realized that it really was created from...
a recording of a drop of water falling into a bucket, re-recorded at different speeds to produce the pitches of a pentatonic scale.
Is the other stuff similar sonically?
― Nag! Nag! Nag! (Nag! Nag! Nag!), Saturday, 9 August 2003 13:24 (twenty-two years ago)
goodness. must remember not to post while drunk.
the impressive thing about 'dripsody' and the other pieces is that I initially assumed it was a marathon tape-splice creation. it's not; lecaine was an instrument builder, and one of his instruments was a multitrack tape machine with six independent tape heads he could live mix with. 'dripsody' was constructed out of improvisations & assembled in one night. and that's why it's so fun, it's not overdetermined; it's edited performances of improvisations and sounds like live music.
there are great pictures of him playing his multitrack instrument in the booklet. it's got a 1.5 octave keyboard on it for pitch control.
many of these pieces are short studies where he starts with taped materials and then turns the multitrack loose on them. piano studies, organ, signal generators. some lovely, bizarre, evolving drones with odd tunings. also some superb quick-splice collage works. the 'composition' section of the record is just hit after hit, they all sound fantastic.
there's also his invention the 'sackbut', the world's first voltage controlled synthesizer. It's an expressive beast (touch sensitive) and does some very bizarre horn and string sounds.
― jl (Jon L), Saturday, 9 August 2003 19:48 (twenty-two years ago)
There's a book on LeCaine--"Sackbutt Blues". Available, as is a cd with various recordings by LeCaine, from www.emf.org
― Stephen Boyle (SBoyle), Monday, 11 August 2003 16:05 (twenty-two years ago)