Search - Paul Lansky :: Paul Lansky: Ride

Electronic composer Paul Lansky returns with his seventh album for Bridge Records. RIDE continues Lansky's exploration of new sounds in music. Idle Chatter Junior (1999) has fun with the basic idea of turning incomprehensible speech into percussion music. Ride has a predecessor in Lansky's earlier track Night Traffic, which has been featured on Homebrew (BRIDGE 9035) and the DVD My Cinema for the Ears (Bridge 9117). Ride, like Night Traffic before it is based on recordings of a local four-lane highway in Princeton, New Jersey. This material is embedded in a rich and complex texture, and captures the sensation of being on a ride through various landscapes, towns and villages, rather than the experience of watching traffic pass by, as in Night Traffic. Looking Back is a short piece written for the 60th anniversary of the High School of Music and Art in New York City, a place where Lansky spent three years of his childhood. The piece is a foggy processing of him singing the school song. For the piano part of Heavy Set Lansky designed a computer model of the right hand of an imaginary (and very large) improvising pianist. The model attempts to think as a pianist might as he moves around the keyboard, listening to the concurrent harmonies, deciding when to add non-harmonic tones, play chords, go up, go down, play loud, soft, lyrically, firmly, and so on. The computer model only helped with the piano part, however. The rest of the music was written the old-fashinoned way. Dancetracks: Remix: In 1994 Lansky wrote what basically amounts to a fancy computer-synthesized drum track for an improvising electric guitarist, and called it Dancetracks. In 1997, Lansky's friend and colleague, Steve Mackey recorded it on his CD Lost and Found (BRIDGE 9065). Steve's version was so wonderful that the urge to participate further was too much to resist. Lansky therefore decided to continue the process and make the piece into a kind of musical chain letter. Lansky took Mackey's performance, entirely removed the original 'drum track', scrambled and edited the guitar part, and added a completely new computer part. The result is a new and very different piece that is somewhat darker than the original.