...different from the one you are in now."
In I Am Sitting in a Room, experimental composer Alvin Lucier recites a paragraph's worth of text describing how he is recording his voice and re-recording it over and over until the room's resonance effect overwhelms the original speech to be unintelligible and resolves it into pure, rhythmic tones. I've grown partial to playing his Music on a Long Thin Wire in the background occasionally when I'm working on something tedious, so I've been curious to here this, his most prominet work. The version I recently acquired runs forty-five minutes long, so I decided to pop it in my CD player, turn off all the lights, bundle up under some blankets on my couch, and listen to it in a near meditative state without interruption. Listening closely to the words, I lay staring up at the fragmented streaks of light up on my ceiling, which were coming from the nearby window. The narration remained clearly audible for the first six or so repetitions, though the words became increasingly more distorted, muffled, and robotic-sounding with each re-recording of them. As the words began to disappear until finally the voice became less and less discernible, the distortion grew surprisingly harmonious as the resonant frequencies sang against one another like a wind chime, but much more languid and deeper in tone. Around this point, I closed my eyes to concentrate further, since my thoughts had started to wander, and I'm not sure but I may have fallen asleep for a brief period of undetermined time. The pure resonance comprised well over half the recording's time, sounding almost like deep sea whales communicating to one another. With patience and attention, this musical piece can be an enchanting, ethereal experience. And although not as drastically intense, it reminded me slightly of Michael Snow's film, WVLNT, as it was just as hypnotic and compelling.
Arguments could easily be made that this is not music but rather merely an experiment in the physics of sounds, but choosing to use his own voice, especially as the re-recordings slowly mask his slight stutter which he alludes to in the last line of his narration, makes the piece incredibly personal. One can't deny the serenity the slow progression yields over an attentive listener.
As I'm becoming increasingly bored with hearing the same old music not just in mainstream music but even within my own collection and tastes, Lucier's compositions have proven to be refreshing, if not extreme in their difference. I've been trying to move beyond my typical pop rock preferences and as so, I have been getting back (not to imply that I was ever that immersed) into classical, non-lyric oriented music lately, though my knowledge at this point remains highly superficial, for now.
In I Am Sitting in a Room, experimental composer Alvin Lucier recites a paragraph's worth of text describing how he is recording his voice and re-recording it over and over until the room's resonance effect overwhelms the original speech to be unintelligible and resolves it into pure, rhythmic tones. I've grown partial to playing his Music on a Long Thin Wire in the background occasionally when I'm working on something tedious, so I've been curious to here this, his most prominet work. The version I recently acquired runs forty-five minutes long, so I decided to pop it in my CD player, turn off all the lights, bundle up under some blankets on my couch, and listen to it in a near meditative state without interruption. Listening closely to the words, I lay staring up at the fragmented streaks of light up on my ceiling, which were coming from the nearby window. The narration remained clearly audible for the first six or so repetitions, though the words became increasingly more distorted, muffled, and robotic-sounding with each re-recording of them. As the words began to disappear until finally the voice became less and less discernible, the distortion grew surprisingly harmonious as the resonant frequencies sang against one another like a wind chime, but much more languid and deeper in tone. Around this point, I closed my eyes to concentrate further, since my thoughts had started to wander, and I'm not sure but I may have fallen asleep for a brief period of undetermined time. The pure resonance comprised well over half the recording's time, sounding almost like deep sea whales communicating to one another. With patience and attention, this musical piece can be an enchanting, ethereal experience. And although not as drastically intense, it reminded me slightly of Michael Snow's film, WVLNT, as it was just as hypnotic and compelling.
Arguments could easily be made that this is not music but rather merely an experiment in the physics of sounds, but choosing to use his own voice, especially as the re-recordings slowly mask his slight stutter which he alludes to in the last line of his narration, makes the piece incredibly personal. One can't deny the serenity the slow progression yields over an attentive listener.
As I'm becoming increasingly bored with hearing the same old music not just in mainstream music but even within my own collection and tastes, Lucier's compositions have proven to be refreshing, if not extreme in their difference. I've been trying to move beyond my typical pop rock preferences and as so, I have been getting back (not to imply that I was ever that immersed) into classical, non-lyric oriented music lately, though my knowledge at this point remains highly superficial, for now.
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