Richard Lainhart
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Richard Lainhart

New City, New York, United States | INDIE

New City, New York, United States | INDIE
Band EDM Avant-garde

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Press


"Richard Lainhart - The Wave-Sounding Sea"

In sleevenotes to Richard Lainhart's 2001 release Ten Thousand Shades Of Blue, his composition teacher Joel Chadabe recalls that when they first met, at the start of the 1970s, the question in the air was, "what were the special musical things you could do with electronics?" Lainhart's answer, Chadabe continues, was "a new kind of constructivism based on sounds that are only about themselves and their transformations". The resulting music may be self-referential, but Lainhart's enduring interest in natural processes - water flowing, cloud patterns, the play of flames, wind moving through trees - provides a ready parallel for the way he works with processes in sound.

All four pieces on The Wave-Sounding Sea were recorded at the State University of New York, Albany in 1973 and 1974, using the state-of-the-art Coordinated Electronic Music Studio System developed by Chadabe in association with Robert Moog. The title track is a darkly pulsating Morton Subotnick-influenced soundscape, brooding and non-human. With Iron Hill Lainhart found his own voice. It was the first realization of his One Sound concept, which delivers what it says, a 12-minute organ-like blast, massive but teeming with inner life. Snow is a very different One Sound composition, brittle and closely focused, situated ambivalently between shortwave sferics and crackling ice.

The remaining track, FM Automat, is an experimental exercise, a discontinuous series of electronic events generated using a single frequency modulation patch. Its effect resembles casting your eye across related shades in a color chart. Lainhart's mature work has something of the appeal of Eliane Radigue's music, constant yet discreetly developmental and secretly rich in detail. The Wave-Sounding Sea shows him working towards that.

Julian Cowley
The Wire 317
July, 2010 - The Wire 317 July, 2010


"Concert Review"

"Composure also seemed to be a strength of Richard Lainhart's music at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation April 6. Just as Suzuki maintained his curiosity throughout an evening of experiments with sound, Lainhart maintained a tone of quiet warmth and even reverence throughout three tape pieces, each a half-hour or so long. They seemed to grow more peaceful and profound as they went on, and justified titles like "Bronze Cloud Disk" and "Cities Of Light", which seemed to evoke feelings that can't quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose."

Gregory Sandow - Village Voice, May 27, 1981


"Concert Review"

"More successful aesthetically because the system worked were tone essays by Richard Lainhart, who transformed Chadabe's program into an Eno-ish wash of sensual tone decays. Soft chords formed a suspended background for loud attacks that took an eternity to die away, and the aptly titled "Ten Thousand Shades of Blue" diminuendoed into ambiguously bittersweet dissonance. A more industrial-strength work, "Paint Test Area", smashed together repetitive patterns of heavy, rebounding noises. The Russian and Italian Futurists of the 1920s would have given their right hands to produce sonatas such as this, and had they seen Lainhart achieve his results with only the tiniest of finger movements, they would have dropped dead from envy."

Kyle Gann - Village Voice, January 10, 1989


"Record Review"

"Alternately using synthesizer and vibes, Lainhart sustains and amplifies a profoundly tranquil ambience from start to finish." - Keyboard Magazine (1987)


"Record Review"

"From the earliest... to the most recent.. these pieces all unfold from what appears to be the same deep, interior landscape. Curiously elusive but distinctly 'real' music." - Gramophone, The Classical Music Magazine (2001)


"Record Review"

"He's evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism... Rewarding, engaging music that's worth your time."

Peter Marsh - BBC (2002)


"Record Review"

"White Night" proceeds slowly, with carefully modulated sine waves and shifting tones interacting subtly across four tracks like a tempered music of the spheres. ... perfectly ambient, a long, deep, thirty-minute exhalation of breath. A very beautiful release that seems totally modern... that I can't recommend highly enough. - Other Music (2008)


"DVD Review"

"Two highly talented keyboardists, a drool-worthy collection and instruments, and trippy projected video: Such are the ingredients in Jordan Rudess' and Richard Lainhart's DVD A Fistful of Patchcords, recorded from a live 2006 concert. The footage makes it abundantly clear that Jordan (already idolized for his work with Dream Theater) and Richard are synthesis masters. In their hands, spacey jams evolve full of emotion and nuance, making excellent use of both old-school analog and cutting-edge digital sound sources. Unusual for sure, but highly creative, musical, and satisfying."

Michael Gallant - Keyboard Magazine, February 2007


"Record Review"

"Many contemporary musicians take their inspiration from natural processes. Lainhart's musical models come from clouds, flames and waves, whose nebulous and ever shifting formations are the catalyst for his beautiful electronic works."

Caleb Deupree - Furthernoise, November 2008


Discography

(with Signs of Life) "Red Dust" on Vacant Lot compilation, 1987
"These Last Days" Periodic Music, 1987
"Ten Thousand Shades of Blue" XI Records, 2001
"White Nights (remixed)" on compilation "I, Mute Hummings" Ex Ovo, 2006
"White Night" Ex Ovo, 2008
"The Luminous Air" on 10" EP with Hakobune "Luminous Accidents", Tobira Records, 2009
"Lift-off" on compilation "Galactic Hits", Maison d’Ailleurs, 2010
"The Wave-Sounding Sea" VICMOD Records, 2010
"Cranes Fly West - Limited Schiphorst Edition" Ex Ovo, 2010
"The Course of the River" VICMOD Records, 2011
"Cranes Fly West" Ex Ovo, 2011
"The Pelagic Bell" on Electro-shock Records compilation, 2011
"Forming" on Tobira Records compilation, 2011

Photos

Bio

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning electronic composer and filmmaker - a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Inspired by natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, he uses them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as possible.

Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, Infrequency, VICMOD, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2500 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, Rhys Chatham, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 150 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape. In 2009, he was one of 200 electric guitarists who performed in the US premiere of Rhys Chatham's "A Crimson Grail" at Lincoln Center in New York City. In January 2010, he performed as a featured Live Media audio-visual artist at Netmage 2010 in Bologna, Italy. In July 2010, he performed as a featured artist at Avantgarde Festival Schiphorst 2010 in Schiphorst, Germany.

He is best known for his live electroacoustic performances using a Buchla 200e analog modular synthesizer controlled with a Haken Continuum multidimensional keyboard.

Lainhart's animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, Portugal, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and Korea, and online at Souvenirs From Earth, ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film "A Haiku Setting" won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for "No Other Time", a full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection. In 2010, his year-long timescape film "One Year" won the HDFEST Deffie award for Best Experimental Film at HDFEST 2010 in Portland, OR.

You can find examples of his music and digital artworks at his website, http://www.otownmedia.com. Some of his short films are available at http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart. Live performance music clips are available at http://soundcloud.com/rlainhart.

review quotes

[His] "music reflects the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, bringing with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. The spell- binding music seemed to evoke feelings that can't quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose." (Gregory Sandow, The Village Voice).

"He's evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism." (Peter Marsh, BBC)

"These pieces are a reflection of their times – the vocal harmonics of Stockhausen’s Stimmung, the extended durations of Morton Feldman and the claustrophobic atmosphere of Kubrick’s 2001 all spring to mind as reference points." (The Wire)

"… But it's not all mad bluster. On Sunday afternoon, upstairs in a studio-cum-performance space, surrounded by paintings and sculptures in varying states of completion, American minimalist Richard Lainhart, playing his analogue modular synthesizer system, and German theremin player Thomas Zunk perform the world premiere of their new arrangements of two sections from Messiaen's Quartet For The End Of Time. There's a wispy delicacy to the music that feels like the entire audience is holding its breath en masse. In the near-silence, with the windows thrown wide open to the fragrant wild-grass scents of the afternoon, birdsong and insect hum mingling with the theremin's tremulous swoon, it's possible to close one's eyes and imagine that this festival is a kind of heaven." (Daniel Spicer, The Wire)