Search - Paul Panhuysen & Galvanos :: Lost for Words

The notion of this recording as the product of Paul Panhuysen and the Galvanos is meaningful when you consider the 18th-century Italian thinker Luigi Galvani, who contended that just-dead animal tissue could be revived with electrical currents. Barring snide comments about dead musical tissue, Panhuysen takes sounds that have been committed to tape and channels them through electrical wires that resonate accordingly and mechanically play string instruments. The resonators register and express motion according to the input signal, which here spans from aging 78-rpm recordings of Stalin speeches to choruses of birds to the composer and the Maciunas Ensemble humming almost inaudibly. In proportion to the resonating stimulus, the string-instrument response drones or clangs or pulsates, always sounding like a distant, irresistible, metallic hum. It's an ingenious, if slightly cold, expressiveness and fans of machine-generated sounds (think Ligeti's Mechanical Music), electric harp, and even the long-string instrument (especially Ellen Fullman's Change of Direction) won't want to miss this recording. --Andrew Bartlett