Matt Nida
It feels faintly miraculous that we can enjoy such an immersive recording nearly fifty years after this extraordinary performance. But also: I love that you can clearly hear at least one child in the audience. What an incredible family day out this must have been.
Tom Rimshot
Operatively endless, the sound of the Earth, sung from deep beneath the surface of the soil, blown across time and space by mortal lungs, billowing and reverberating, a paean of primordial man, forever echoing tones of warmth and hope like a golden cornucopia filled with the fruits of Eden itself.
Earth Horns with Electronic Drone
(original program notes)
"The electronics is an open system that processes and stores information about real-time acoustic activity, and recycles it back into the acoustic environment where it becomes a part of a further tone cycle which is again fed into the system and back into the acoustic space…etc.
"The resonance of each Pipehorn is in tune with the AC line cycle of the room. Seven electronic tones, tuned harmonics of the line cycle, are independently generated. Because the sounds are harmonics of overtones of each other, all changes become modulations of a single resonating acoustic environment. Each of the tones can be varied independently or in their combination in an open system. The electronic system is always sensitive to real time activity as well as summing and deriving changes from Pipehorn loudness and duration. Here the electronic controls that add, subtract and multiply are derived directly from changes in Pipehorn loudness, duration and interaction. Electronic sound and Pipehorn sound mix in the acoustic time/space of the performance, recycling and reinforcing sound change. People can hear this sound of subtle movement, the interacting of electronic sound and Pipehorn sound. This creates a dynamic sound environment.
"The point is to create a sound environment (or performance situation) where people are able to listen to this almost primitive, visceral, acoustic sound of the Pipehorns (constructed from ordinary plumbing materials and steam fittings) together with their matching, electronically transformed sounds, for extended periods of time. These instruments, musically, have a precise pitch, and can generate these pure electronic sounds, as well, which are unique to this situation. I am most interested in the effect, psychologically, of these subtle tones and movements on both players and audience alike, particularly played, as I plan, over an extended period of time."
—Yoshi Wada
Music in Review: Wada Pipe Horns in Concert
(original concert review)
"Yoshimasa Wada is a Japanese-born former sculptor who has lived in this country for the last seven years and who has devoted himself to sound for the last five. Recently he has concerned himself with ever-larger, homemade "pipe horns," as he calls them, and last Sunday evening at the Kitchen, 59 Wooster Street, he presented the second of two concerts showing his latest work.
"There were four tons on hand, the longest (played by Mr. Wada) more than 20 feet long, the fattest 10 inches in its interior diameter. Mr. Wada, Garrett List, Rhys Chatham and Barbara Stewart blew the horns more or less steadily for nearly two hours, producing deep, resonant sounds separated mostly at the intervals of the fifth and octave, although there was some appealing microtonal drifting, too. There was also an electronic setup under Liz Phillips's direction that generated fixed synthesized tones triggered by what the live players did.
"The result was certainly one of the more coloristically attractive of the many recent instances of minimalist, steady-state sound that one hears these days, rather like an evening's worth of the very beginning of Wagner's "Rheingold." The horns themselves are evocative in their Tibetan way, and the shifting balance between live imperfection and electronic eternality proved continually suggestive."
—John Rockwell, The New York Times
credits
released March 31, 2009
Composed by Yoshi Wada
Pipehorns constructed by Yoshi Wada
Electronics designed by Liz Phillips and Yoshi Wada
Jim Burton, Garrett List, Barbara Stewart, and Yoshi Wada, Pipehorn players
Liz Phillips, electronics
Recorded on February 24, 1974, at Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY
Mastered by Koichi Hara
Photography by Seiji Kakizaki
Originally released in 2009 by EM Records/Edition Omega Point (EM1081/OP-0007)
Yoshi Wada (b. 1943, Kyoto, Japan–d. 2021, New York) was a composer and artist associated with the downtown New York,
experimental arts scene of the last fifty years, including Minimalist music and the Fluxus art movement. In the early 1970s, Wada began building homemade musical instruments and writing compositions for them based on his personal research in timbre, resonance, and improvisation....more
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