PRICE:
$15.50
LOW STOCK LEVEL
3-4 Weeks
ARTIST
TITLE
Lumière
FORMAT
CD

LABEL
CATALOG #
SR 327CD SR 327CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
7/5/2011

This real masterpiece of concrète and synthesized music hasn't been available since its original manufacture in 1973, originally released by Varèse International Records. Dub Taylor is a U.S. composer, producer, engineer and designer born June 22, 1948 in Burbank, California. He has many creative facets: recording and mastering engineer, record producer as well as composer, graphic designer and visual artist. He has studied with pianist Richard Bunger and composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Not long after the release of Lumière, Taylor established Vargod Studios for electronic music and recorded sound, where in 1974 he created his second work, Variations On The "Dudley Do-Right" Theme for sampled and processed sound (never released before, this exclusive track is included on the CD version). Taylor has bounced between the music world and the visual arts for most of his life and continues to pursue diverse creative projects. "Lumière evolved over a period of three years from 1969 to 1972. I started by recording random sounds: jets taking off at LAX, my girlfriend laughing and screaming, my cat Bartok biting a microphone, conversations, etc. I also sampled music, film soundtracks and TV and radio broadcasts. During this period I acquired the first self-contained portable synthesizer, the newly-designed ARP 2600. I began to envision an electronic and musique concrète piece combining various natural and processed sound recordings with synthesized sound into a suite of noise. In June of 1972, I did a preliminary version of elements of the piece. By October I was ready to put it all together. I set up all these reel-to-reel machines with tapes I had pre-recorded and plugged them into a mixing board, feeding stereo to a two-track master 15 IPS Revox A77 tape deck. My idea was to create a sound collage with form but without losing spontaneity and an element of randomness. So I rehearsed my fade-ins and fade-outs and the starting and stopping of the various playback decks and when I was ready I went for it, "playing" all these machines like a musical instrument in this mad moment of creation. In effect, Lumière was a "live" performance. The only later additions were the silence gaps inserted near the end of the piece using pieces of blank leader tape." --Dub Taylor