All Right Then, Go Ahead and TELL Me About Paul Lansky

I used to correspond with him via email. Interesting guy. I haven't heard that much of his music though. Mild Und Leise, Night Traffic, and Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion. All quite good. I'd like to hear more but I'm having considerable trouble locating any.

Haha I forgot about Alphabet Book! I do actually have that and it's quite good.

Halfway through composing a long, rambling, and probably not terribly interesting post, it occurred to me that what you really want is
Lansky's own webpages at Princeton. You'll find liner notes from recordings, downloadable signal processing software, info on where to buy recordings, and other interesting stuff.

No, really, P.i.S.C., go ahead and tell me yr take on Lansky. I'm not a-gonna download any signal processing software; I just wanna know: Is his other stuff worth searching out?

My posting karma is low, apparently -- I've trashed the old text (no great loss), and now I've just lost a nearly completed post that I think would have been slightly better.

So, briefly:

The Lansky stuff I know best is based on digital processing of real-world sounds. A bit like musique concrete, but instead of assembling new sound formations out of little snippets of manipulated audio, Lansky tends to run long streams of real-world sound through his filters. The results sit on an interesting balance point: you're listening to found audio, brought into interesting kinds of focus by the processing, but you're also listening to the processors, with their own characteristic sonic signatures, "activated" by whatever audio happens to be flowing through it. the balance tips one way or the other depending on the piece, but lots of Lansky's work seems to be exploring parts of this continuum.

I tend to like the speech-based pieces best, and I tend to like ones where the signal processing is relatively intrusive (so I'm a little less keen on Things She Carried, parts of which sound like a spoken-word piece with background music -- although I think it has great moments). I'd put these recordings at the top of my list:

More Than Idle Chatter, Bridge 9050 (1994)
- Idle Chatter
- Word Color
- just_more_idle_chatter
- The Lesson
- Notjustmoreidlechatter
- Memory Pages

Fantasies and Tableaux, CRI 683 (1994)
- Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion
- Still Time

(And I should add a caveat that I haven't heard anything he's done in the past 5 years or so...)