3 out of 5

Label: Lovely Music

Producer: Alvin Lucier

I own plenty of experimental music.  We can sit here and argue definitions of what constitutes “music,” but if we did, I’d probably give this recording five stars.  I picked up “I Am Sitting” after I listened to Hydra Head’s release “Drawing Voices,” which transformed the recording of various materials drawing / writing into ambient noise, cut in with some other instrumental noodling.  It’s not that it’s the best listen, but it’s fascinating, and had me intrigued at other similar concepts… which led to “I Am Sitting.”  The principle of this sounds great – record a phrase and play it into a room and record it.  Then, play it back your recording into that same room and record it.  Repeat, and repeat.  The sound slowly resonates in the room until, after so many repetitions, its smoothed out into a drone of almost metallic noise, humming up and down with the basic pitch of the speaker’s voice.

Lucier sounds like a wonderful man, and I love that he tried this.  The results are not surprising (I think anyone, with some prodding, could figure out what would eventually happen), but the patience and planning needed to perform and record them well are respectable.  The same goes true with other parts of his career.  Once you’ve worked your way into an experimental field, you can’t fault someone for continually trying to find new ways to capture their particular medium, and so Lucier mined a similar vein for his career, with – shock – more classical music leanings when he wasn’t messing with tapes.

What I’m faulting here is that we’re basically listening to an experiment, not experimental music.  I enjoy this 30 minute plus recording once it gets to where the words have become tones, and I understand that to fully get the idea, you do need to record it from phrase one until phrase whatever’s repetition, but that’s what marks it as an experiment.  There’s also – sorry, Alvin – the sort of high-falutin’ phrase he chose, “resonant frequencies” and “irregularities” and again, he sounds totally like a gentle, nice man, but I mention the “shock” of his classical leanings above because he is the type to discuss with you about the definitions of music, or so I hastily judge (hence his exploration of this field, I suppose), and is the type who would sit and listen to a live performance of this experiment and probably stand up and applaud, in tears, at the end.  It’s a particular breed of person, smarter than me and totally required to balance out the world of art and science and give me things I need like medicine and, I dunno, the technology that allows me to watch porn online, but I don’t really feel like having a conversation with Alvin.  Should I base my rating of “I Am Sitting” off of this?  Well, it factors into the ‘feelings’ I get when ‘listening’ to it, so: sure.

My overall point is that this would be spliced up and done differently if it were intended as music, or even to evoke emotion.  As the recording stands, one full take, it’s more of a document of an experiment.  A fascinating one, but one that doesn’t really prove or disprove anything, and unlike Drawing Voices, it doesn’t find sounds via a method that makes me stop and think.