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Paul Lansky: Notjustmoreidlechatter (1988)

From the album More Than Idle Chatter (1994)

By name at least, Lansky is fairly well-known thanks to Radiohead’s track “Idioteque,” which samples his 1973 piece Mild und leise (which in turn quotes the 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner).

Notjustmoreidlechatter is based on computer manipulations of human speech— specifically, the voice of Lansky’s wife reading from Jane Eyre.  While many composers have used the voice as a purely phonetic resource in contemporary music, Lansky’s composition is unusual in coupling an experimental treatment of speech with more conventional musical patterns.  It has a powerful rhythmic pulse, and the harmonic progressions suggested by the babel of voices sounds like it was borrowed from Enya.  The tension between the weirdness of the sound material and the conventionality of its use makes for a delightfully strange and beautiful piece of music.

May 07, 2009, 11:49am