Artist: Paul Lansky
Album: Touch & Go (2024/2025)
Label: Bridge Records
Genre: Contemporary Classical / Electro-acoustic / Percussion
Reviewer: Mark Weber
Paul Lansky (b. 1944) looms large for me because somewhere back in memory he took a reel-to-reel to a freeway at night in the early ’70s and recorded the trucks and cars whizzing by. It was southern Ohio — Rt. 71 about 20 miles north of Cincinnati after the long drive south from Cleveland — it's déjà vu. He takes the tapes back into the studio, alters the sound, expands and contracts, double-shifts phases — Doppler immersive — and drives this four-lane highway deep into your memory. It’s 40,000 BC and you’ve crawled up the Danube River from the Black Sea into deep Europe.
All of which is my fiction — part of me swears it’s true. The fact is, Lansky recorded what became his monumental “Night Music” in 1987 on Route 5 in California. I drove Rt. 71 many times in the mid-80s and it sure sounds like that stretch to me. Déjà vu. Paul studied with Milton Babbitt — that’s huge. Babbitt’s body of work is monumental in the field of electro-acoustic music and chamber. So maybe that’s Lansky’s forte: déjà vu. You remember it from somewhere, neanderthalic, basic, just above subconscious memory. So, anything Paul Lansky does, I’m all ears.
This new release of recent percussion pieces is a prize. Bridge Records is a giant in this field. If you see a record on Bridge, then you know it’s going to be something. And Paul could record a flushing toilet and I’d listen.
