Search - Ingram Marshall :: Ingram Marshall: Ikon and Other Early Works

Fans of Ingram Marshall's later sensuous textural works on New Albion records will be keen to discover the composer's oblique minimal roots on these long-out-of-print works recorded between 1972 and 1976. Jumping into the minimal game half a decade late, Marshall had the luxury of refining a didactic genre into a personal statement. This disc eloquently demonstrates how Marshall synthesized electronic, acoustic, found, and speech sounds into densely gentle repetitive works that are all his own. By using mostly Scandinavian material (radio broadcasts, poetry, cowbells), Marshall comes up with an odd sort of Esperanto-like vocabulary, amounting to a recasting of world music into classical music. Most of the pieces are based on the sounds of speech, which are then transformed into musical elements based on their phonetic and rhythmic inflections. Much of the disc takes its cue from Steve Reich's tape pieces, like "It's Gonna Rain", but it delves into musical processes that Reich never touched. The result is a beautiful minimalism, one in which speech becomes music and music becomes speech. Occasionally, the speech is substituted for musicality as in "Sibelius in His Radio Corner," which transforms snatches of Sibelius's 6th Symphony into what sounds like a current-day piece of electronica; think Stockhausen's "Hymen" meets the short-wave radio numbers stations of "The Conet Project." --Kenneth Goldsmith