Alvin Lucier - Criss-Cross / Hanover LP

Black Truffle present the premier recordings of two recent works by legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier. Lucier has been crafting elegant explorations of the behavior of sound in physical space since the 1960s and is perhaps best known for his 1970 piece I Am Sitting In a Room. He has written a remarkable catalog of instrumental works that focus on phenomena produced by the interference between closely tuned pitches, often using pure electronic tones produced by oscillators in combination with single instruments. Demonstrating the restless creative drive of an artist now in his 80s, the two recent works presented here both feature the electric guitar, an instrument Lucier has just recently begun to explore. In "Criss-Cross," Lucier's first composition for electric guitars, two guitarists using e-bows sweep slowly up and down a single semitone, beginning at opposite ends of the pitch range. The piece exemplifyies Lucier's desire not to "compose" in the conventional sen