Browse by Artist: LA BARBARA, JOAN

Artist:	LA BARBARA, JOAN
Title:	Sound Paintings
Label:	LOVELY MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	LCD 3001

Originally released in 1990 by Lovely Music. "Joan La Barbara, voice. Joan La Barbara begins Sound Paintings with a scream that pushes you into an unusual world of vocal sound. Her virtuoso singing style, developed over a 20-year period, can be heard on this disc, which combines some of her earlier works with more recent compositions. She takes her extended techniques, which include multiphonics, overtone singing, and glottal clicks, and orchestrates them in layered soundscape compositions using from 8 to 16 tracks of material."

Artist:	LA BARBARA, JOAN
Title:	Voice Is The Original Instrument - Early Works
Label:	LOVELY MUSIC
Format:	2CD
Price:	$26.00
Catalog #:	LCD 3003

Collection of early works & her first vocal compositions, originally released on LPs in the 1970s and early 1980s on her own Wizard Records. "One of my earliest pieces, 'Hear What I Feel', was a self-exploratory, sensory-deprivation experimental work, designed to help me discover new sounds, delve into psychological aspects, as well as communicate with the audience on a pre-verbal level of awareness. After spending an hour in isolation with my eyes taped shut and nor touching anything with my hands, I was led our into the performance space where my assistant had placed a variety of substances in six small glass dishes. As I touched the material, I tried to give an immediate vocal response to what I felt both emotionally and physically, without the benefit of visual information. I expected the shock of bringing a solitary state of mind into the heightened awareness of a performance situation to intensify my experience, and the poignancy of my 'prepared' state to affect the audience. The sounds are presented here in their raw state; it is truly an experimental work with no intentional musical implications or designs. 'Voice Piece: One-Note Internal Resonance Investigation' explores the color spectrum of a single pitch. Circular Song was inspired by the circular breathing technique of horn players. 'Des Accords pour Teeny', an exploration of multi-phonic technique or choral singing, was dedicated to Teeny Duchamp. In much of my early work I dealt with sound as a physical presence, sculpting it, building up layers in complex constructions, letting the flow of thought and the visualization of sonic gestures direct my studio art. Voice Is the Original Instrument was both a statement of purpose and a manifesto as, through various experiments and explorations, I tried to rediscover the basic function of the voice as the first means of expression as well as to release untapped sonic material. As I gave my classically trained voice its freedom, letting it direct me toward new places and ideas, I developed what was a unique vocabulary and used those sounds to score an orchestra of layered voices."

Artist:	LA BARBARA, JOAN
Title:	ShamanSong
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80545CD

"Composer/performer Joan La Barbara has been an influential figure in experimental music since the early 1970s. She has devoted her career to the exploration of the human voice as a multi-faced instrument. ShamanSong features three premieres of vintage La Barbara 'sound paintings' of pensive beauty and spiritual resonance. ShamanSong is a concert suite comprised of selected excerpts from a film score. 'Plaintive descending chords of soft hammers striking an ancient Balinese gamelan instrument, tar and dumbek, shakuhachi, music box tines, rainstick and African rattles all are blended with sighs and whispers, lamentation and ululations, calls, cries, lullabies and vocal winds to weave a strange mystery...'Rothko' is a series of sound paintings designed to reflect the mood, texture and emotion of Mark Rothko's final paintings for this very special chapel -- dark, intense, but with an inner light and moving figures that are sometimes heard, sometimes hidden.'"

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