I have to confess that I don’t usually like tape and voice pieces. But when the voice is Joan LaBarbara’s, that does help. And when the text is a poem, a real poem. And when the voice is often altered beyond recognition. And when the tape noises are so consistently interesting, and […]

Naturally there are rain sounds, at first. The heavily altered voice saying “The rain has a slap and a curve” is a shock, especially with the wild electronic exaggeration of the word “slap.” There are a couple more altered voice bits, but none accompanied so extravagantly. I’d venture to guess that the […]

Starts out innocently enough, with some nice guitar strumming. But then a line is added, tuned ever so slightly off, and that does it. No matter how sweetly the guitar plays for the rest of the piece, it’s almost always got wild electric noises swirling about it, some of them distortions of […]

I want to say that this piece does not so much use sounds to construct a musical argument as it is a piece that is about sounds, a piece that presents sounds and lets them be themselves. Glass and metal. Sounds made by spinning or rolling. Clattering and tapping. Whirring and buzzing.
Around midpiece, […]

Dhoormages is made up of three short pieces, “Variation on a door, not a sigh,” “I am sitting in a…,” and “Waterrun,” three tributes to other electroacoustic works, Henry’s Variations on a door and a sigh, Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” , and Truax’s Riverrun. You don’t need to know […]

As one might guess, this is made up primarily (solely) of clock sounds. Logically enough, it starts off with the winding up, it moves on to the ticking, then to the chiming. But that’s just intro. As soon as the second chime refuses to decay (and the clicking sound of the winding gear […]