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Richard Lainhart - White Night Cat.#.: EXO1974 Price: 10,00 € Order via email to info@exovo.org (
Press info: Back in 1974, one year before Brian Eno’s first landmark in Ambient-music, some young musician from New York wrote down a fragment of beauty’s hidden story with the minimal vocabulary of sine waves on the young black skin of a Moog synthesizer. The first release on CD features Richard Lainhart’s masterpiece in its original 29-minutes-version. There’s no single second to add, after this time everything is told though nothing has been said. Richard Lainhart about the work’s origin: "White Night" was composed and recorded in the late fall of 1974 at the State University of New York at Albany in the Coordinated Electronic Music Studio (CEMS). CEMS was created by my composition teacher Joel Chadabe with design and custom fabrication by Robert Moog and was, at the time, the largest integrated Moog modular synthesizer studio in the world. The piece consists of a dense, continuous four-note chord, each note in the chord recorded in a separate pass to one track on a Scully 4-track studio recorder. Each track consists of a single sine wave oscillator which is frequency modulated by a group of eight additional sine wave oscillators. Those oscillators are all tuned to different tones, each harmonically related to the fundamental chord tone. The amplitude of each harmonic oscillator is continuously varied under the control of an individual sequencer, and each sequencer is free-running - that is, the sequencers are not synchronized to each other, but rather running in their own independent timebases.The result is a continuously-changing complex harmonic waveform which modulates the frequency of the chord tone oscillator, generating a continuously-changing complex timbre based on the fundamental pitch of the note. The center tone of "White Night" is 212 Hz, slightly higher than the G below Middle C. The other notes create a chord consisting of a perfect fifth below the center tone, a major seventh just below the center tone, and a major second above the center tone. "White Night" was composed without reference to the standard A-440 tuning system, as we had no such pitch reference in the studio; I just picked a center tone that felt right, and went from there. As such, "White Night" lives in its own pitch world. The title "White Night" came about so: it was late December in upstate New York when I was finishing the piece, and a blizzard passed through town the night of the final mix. As I sat in the glow of the sequencers and tape decks in the University studio listening to the final version, I looked out the window and saw a security light on a building opposite the studio illuminating the blowing snow as it drifted off the roof. All I could see was the snow swirling in the light against the blackness; a moving painting continually drawn, erased, and redrawn, always changing, but always the same. It may sound bleak, but it wasn't - it was beautiful. It seemed to me that the image of the dancing whiteness perfectly matched the sound of the piece, and so I called it "White Night" to commemorate that evening of wind and snow."
Reviews: “[...] 'White Night' is incredibly intense in build-up, sound and production. But it's only 30 minutes, and it's just ... Well ... I want more! [...]To make a long story short, Richard Lainhart created a piece of music which now, 35 years later, would be labeled under analog drones the way they are made nowadays by the big drone artists. And Ex Ovo might well be the perfect label for this release.” Bauke van der Wal, Gothtronic. To read the full review: www.gothtronic.com “[...] Over the last thirty years ambient music has developed in all sorts of manners, from listening to pure field recordings to ambient house, rock and what else. The biggest part however is played by musicians who use a lot of synthesizers to create music that fills your environment and makes you feel good. This could, historically, be linked back to Lamonte Young, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros and Charlemagne Palestine, the origins of western drone music. Now Ex Ovo releases the whole, twenty-nine minute piece, and, while named after a snowy night on which it was recorded, today it's actually very sunny and not cold here. But the sun provides a sharp light in my room, and the swirling tones of Lainhart's moog are presently there in my environment. Maybe I still think it's regular ambient music, but I must also admit that it's a very fine piece of music. A nice piece of drone music, not unlike the latter day Mirror or Christoph Heeman, or in fact some of Eno's own later work. A solid piece.” Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly #614. To read the full review: www.vitalweekly.net “Ex Ovo als Schatzkästchen; ein weiteres Mal. "White Night", fast 30 Minuten lang, ist das für mich bisher perfekteste Beispiel dafür, dass es möglich ist, Musik zu schaffen, die eine unirdisch strahlende, fast gleissende Anmut besitzt: ein suggestiver Sog reinen Schönklangs, kraftvoll als Ganzes; fragil im Detail; fast sakral im Auftritt [...]. Mit anderen Worten, in Bezug auf (eine mögliche Sichtweise von) Ambient bzw. Drone: perfekt. Und das alles: 1974. Noch vor Enos definitionsprägenden Soloalben, ohne auch nur im Ansatz Teil dessen ikonenhaften Pionierstatus zu werden. Vielleicht auch, weil ein Stück wie "White Night" mal eben 21 Jahre im Archiv lag. [...]” Hellmut Neidhardt, Unruhr. To read the full review: www.unruhr.de “[...] Ein Schmankerl für Dronefetischisten, die gerne eine Reise in die Vergangenheit tätigen möchten. Neueinsteigern hingegen bringt "White Night" entweder den richtigen Unterbau für weitere Hörstudien oder den ersten Anstoß, sich mit Drones intensiv zu befassen. "White Night" ein Klassiker, den Sammler von Droneoeuvres im Schrank haben müssen - absolute Kaufempfehlung! Volle Innovationspunktzahl, weil "White Night" zu den echten Anfängen des Drones gehört!!!” Raphael Feldmann, Feindesland. To read the full review: www.feindesland.de
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