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AmbiEntrance: Welcome Larry. Did you know you were the first artist to contact me some two-and-a-half years ago and say "I'd like you to review my work"... The
concept that artists would want to send me CDs was something I hadn't even considered as I was starting up my little ambient review site. Anyway, thanks for helping me begin the ongoing evolution of the AmbiEntrance.
Kucharz: You are very welcome. No I didn't know I was the first. I was surfing
the web, lists and newsgroups searching for people to review my CDs. I must
have seen a list email or newsgroup post about your site. My idea was to
get reviews and post them (the good ones or funny bad ones) to lists and
newsgroups. It helps with the sale and promotion of my work and since I
usually include the website or address of the reviewer, it promotes the
reviewer as well.
The internet is a very exciting way of working. It's a way for
independents to get their work known. You can get your music heard and
avoid academic politics or the bureaucracy/politics of the music/art scene.
You also bypass the music industry as well.
AmbiEntrance: When did you start International Audiochrome? Was that also in order to bypass the music industry?
Kucharz: I think that it was back in 1986 that the corporation was formed. I wanted
to bypass both the music industry and the arts bureaucracy. I was in New
York and the "scene" of the mid 70's to early 80's had sort of disipated.
I wanted to get my work out. The music "industry" is not really interested
in new music. The "classical music industry" is really not either. There
are a few names that they'll push but for the most part they're about getting
a prize winning pianist to play a warhorse piano concerto or getting some
conductor to reinterpret the same old symphonies and operas from the past.
The CD does away with concerts and the whole way of promoting a composer and
his music by concerts. I decided to do it myself. I try not to depend
on others. If help comes - great - it's very welcome - help in the form of
reviews and interviews like this. But I believe most artists have to do it
themselves. Maybe I've become my own music industry.
AmbiEntrance: You've been fairly prolific since then (releasing 5 new discs in that time span); how do you account for your volume? Tracks on your CDs often are marked by dates, sometimes referring back as far the 1970s; can you explain this?
Kucharz: Well, sometimes when you're working on a style or musical problem, things go
very slowly and then they go very quickly. Don't forget that my CDs don't
necessarily contain my latest work. Unit 28:blue motion for example was
taken from older works, several from the 1980's. I assembled the CD from
works off the shelf. My latest DigiChoral Blue Portraits has some of my
latest stuff, but also goes back to 1992 and 93 for 3 works and 1978 for the
last work on the CD. I like to insert an old work in my CDs just to let
people know what I was doing at that time.
With titles such as "1976 # 1", I was influenced by the titles the painter
Jackson Pollack used for his paintings. I find find it an easy way to title
a work, and it tells you when it was written too . The problem is, most
people don't react well to titles like this. I think that they find them too
clinical and sterile, much too formal. So I add word titles to the works
and most people can identify with them a little better. In many cases, the
titles have little to do with the work; it's just a convenient handle for
them.
Even I get confused when I refer to works by their number title
because the the number titles are basically all the same - just the years
change. You'll note on the later CDs the dates are in smaller print. It
hides the numbers and even if the piece was written several years ago - the
age is mollified by the word title. For some reason everybody wants to hear
the "latest" even though they haven't heard some very good "older" works
that have never been released.
AmbiEntrance: So these "older" pieces were written in the past; are they newly performed/recorded or are they actual recordings from the given year?
Kucharz: I haven't released any works performed by musicians. Some of the works from the 70's are electro-orchestrations of instrumental works. I think that the music works a lot better that way. Many works on
Unit28:blue motion were taken right off the shelf - not rerecorded -
recorded back in the 80's and early 90's.
AmbiEntrance: How long have you been composing, and was it always in the electronic vein? Tell us about your early musical awakenings.
Kucharz: I guess that I started writing music back in high school maybe around 1963.
I studied the piano and played clarinet in the H.S Band (for which I have
a Letter - A Letter Man! - and a patch for chess - I had the best win
record on the team - I think we took 4th in City).
Musical Awakenings,... as kid, I saw a movie about the life of Chopin and
I fell in love with the music,... I immediately knew what I was going to be
about. I decided to be a Parisian Dandy. I became a New York Dandy
instead.
I wrote instrumental music back then. Electronic musical instruments were
not available to kids then. In college there was a Moog - but I found it
was too awkward to make music with. I did do multi tracked tape works of
voice/text in college and later on. The music I wrote in the 70's was
instrumental. Performances were rare so I've released these works as
electro-orchestrated pieces on CDs... I think they come off better that way
(and you don't have to deal with musicians).
I remember getting an Apple IIe and the Alpha Syntauri music system when it
first came out (was that in the 80's?). That's when I really got into
electronics. The sounds were limited and most had a sweet spot of only a
minor 3rd or 2nd. But that was OK since I was writing minimal music
anyway. I did some sound tracks to my film works on that Syntauri.
Soundtracks for WinterFall and Tracks were written on it. I had a bigger
reputation as a filmmaker than as a composer then. (If the NY Times calls
you a "filmmaker" you damn well better believe that you're a filmmaker.) I
then started renting a studio that had a Fairlight II and did some
interesting stuff with it. The mathematical input system was perfect for
the work I was doing
AmbiEntrance: Can you tell us about your films? Is this something you're still involved with?
Kucharz: They are static images projected for certain time lengths. Sometimes there
was only a single image. (I was really influenced by films of Warhol, like
Empire) Soundtracks were sometimes electronic, sometimes multilayered
text. The images were of deserted city scenes. I'm not as involved as I
once was but I still have a project now and then.
AmbiEntrance: You've been releasing CDs since 1991's Unit 23... Tell us about that release with it's rather stark edges between sounds and silence. To me it
seemed more geometric than musical... Who were your influences?
Kucharz: You're talking about my early 70's works and some early Fairlight works. Yes
the music was inspired by the visual arts.
As far as composer influences go there are two. Back in the early 70's I
was influenced by the music of Morton Feldman with a touch of Varese thrown
in. I studied with Feldman briefly one summer in 73 in Buffalo NY where He
had a teaching position at the University. His living room looked like a
museum with works of Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline Phil Guston - the whole NY
Art scene in a living room.
There was a film department there and I saw lots of experimental films. I
started writing repetitive music because of the influence of the experimental
films, (not music) that I saw in Buffalo. I finished my schooling
(Northwestern D.M.A.) and headed for NY around 1975. In fact my first set
of minimalist "unFeldman" like works were dedicated to him: "10 piano pieces
1973". I was into repeated chords as formal elements. I also did a lot of
text-poetry, film works and intermedia works.
Unit 23 was the first CD I released. It had an all black minimal cover.
There were very austere works as well as some works that really have an edge
on them because of the sounds being used. In retrospect - from an A&R
point of view - I would have selected the works differently either having
all fast hard edge tracks or all slow austere works. It's hard to listen
to as a whole CD - as is my later CD Unit 28:blue motion - just because of
the hard edge fast repeated sounds. They're not really "listen through"
CDs. They're there archiving purposes. It's better to listen to one piece
on them now and then.
AmbiEntrance: So would you say your new disc is an homage, or what? Obviously "DigiChoral Blue Portraits" refers to some of these artists.
Kucharz: The CD is an homage to our Western Classical Choral Music Tradition. Some
of the titles refer to Music Theorists, many of whom made important
contributions to our system of rhythm, notation, tuning, without which our
rich choral tradition would have been impossible. And then there are
titles on DigiChoral Blue Portraits and other CDs what refer to our great
older composers such as Obrecht, Dufay, Monteverdi and Palestrina.
AmbiEntrance: What would these composers think of today's musical capabilities? What would they think of the popular music scene?
Kucharz: I guess that most of them sure would use the latest technology. Very few
composers want to live in the past.
Of the pop music scene... they might think that there's a considerable
part of the listening public that cannot listen to or comprehend music
without a kick bass.
AmbiEntrance: DigiChoral Blue Portraits is the third in your series of electrochoral works; what can you tell us about this form (in general).
Kucharz: In the mid 70's I came out with my signature style of sound and silence used
as a formal devise. I never got into the noodling and doodling of the
Glass/Reich stuff. My work was very austere. I was trying to create a
sonic Mondrian or... better yet for those early works... an acoustic Ad
Reinhardt. The works were repeated chords and silence. For a while I only
used the same chord just to magnify the formal aspect of the music.
As the style developed, I broke the chord into two parts creating two chords
or sonic volumes - two forms moving through silence. Then came works of three
and four part volumes moving through an acoustical space. The more "parts"
you have the less "silence" you get. So as the years went on it eventually
developed to the point where I was writing 8 part long tones with NO
silence.
The next development was adding an interval at the beginning of the long
tone. Those minimal works reminded me of an austere, elegant kind of choral
music written by Palestrina, a Renaissance composer. I even called these
works my Palestrina series. These are the kinds of works that you find on
the choral CDs.
AmbiEntrance: What's the dividing line between your electrochoral works and the pieces which appear on your other discs, like Unit 25: Dark Red and Unit
28: Blue Motion? Why the group heading of "Unit" for those pieces?
Kucharz: The electrochoral series consists mostly of choral works rewritten/arranged
for synths. The works were limited to what a chorus can do. (but I've
managed to sneak in one of my minimal works in the choral CDs.) An aspect
of my works, the choral aspect, developed that way.
The "Unit" CDs were the other works. The "Unit" stuff seems like a good
signature for CD titles.
AmbiEntrance: How would you say the tracks on DigiChoral Blue Portraits differ from those on Metachoral Visions, and Electrochoral Dreams?
Kucharz: So as of a 1998, I started writing "counterpoint" DigiChoral Blue Portraits has 3 "fugal" works on it. (There's also one on Metachoral Visions - the work Palestrina)
You have to understand that I'm using the terms fugal and counterpoint in a
minimalistic sense. These works are very difficult to write because of the
restrictions required to keep them within my own harmonic system. If I got
out of that, I'd be writing like Palestrina or Bach and they write their
music a lot better than I could ever do.
Some of the works on Metachoral Visions, Electrochoral Dreams and DigiChoral
Blue Portraits were written as choral works and not electrochoral works.
They were not getting performed so I modified them a bit and
electro-orchestrated them (or "electrocuted" them as some classical purists
would say.) and released them on my Choral CDs
I wanted to take advantage of the interest in classical music the one finds
in segments of todays non-classical music categories. So I promote these
works as New Age, Space and Ambient Music.
AmbiEntrance: What do you mean by the "restrictions to keep them within your own harmonic system"?
Kucharz: The choral works - unlike my 70's and 80's works - are pretty tame
from the point of view of style. The harmonies might be found in lots of
post romantic early 20th century music. It's how I get to and from the
harmonies that is a little unique. I've sort of developed my own harmonic
system. It was a sound that I was after. To get that sound you have to
avoid certain intervals or harmonic units. So when I write minimal
contrapuntal works, I am limited in the type of "subject" I can use, the
range of the subject that I can use,... and also on what scale degrees I can
use them on. I've boxed myself into a corner but I get what I want.
AmbiEntrance: So you do write strictly "choral" works for the human voice?
Kucharz: I had some vocal things done when I was in college. But the works on the
choral CDs, they were just not getting performed - that's why I decided to
release them as emusic. They're pretty works and - for a lot of the public
- they're a lot easier to warm up to than my other minimal works.
AmbiEntrance: You've mentioned your influences of old; what current artists do you listen to/admire?
Kucharz: I'm excited by what's happening in techno and trance. The way they write
is similar in concept to my early works - not in style but in the modular
approach. I'm really into minimal techno and hard techno I like the
Berlin Chain reaction stuff. I like Frankie Bones.
AmbiEntrance: As you said earlier, you use the Internet for promotion via e-mail and newsgroups; will there be a Larry Kucharz website, and/or an International
Audiochrome site?
Kucharz: There already is a page on the Hypnos website. At the moment that's sufficient. Perhaps there will be more later.
AmbiEntrance: How much has the 'Net helped you? What segment of the population do you think has been most attracted to your sounds?
Kucharz: In the 70's I'd do a concert in NY and hope for a review in the Times. The
internet has changed that and helped me in that I can promote the work in the
form of CDs to a much larger audience. The internet is worldwide.
Also ... Emusic is different in that it requires no performers.
Emusic in not really concert hall music. The standard criticism is: why
go to a concert to watch a pair of speakers? I would reply: why go to a
concert to see a pianist move his fingers?
So I'm not stuck to doing a concert twice a year in NY. Sure, there were
festivals and gigs in other cities, but it was so time consuming and limiting.
The world has become very complex. Time, for most people is very limited.
I think that concerts are a thing of the past. I don't go to them at all
all any longer. For going out, I prefer the theater and ballet. Sure
concerts are social events too, but why kill a whole evening when you can
hear the same music on a CD for half the price.
I think that with the electrochoral CDs I've made some inroads to the New
Age, Space Music, and Ambient Music as well as the Classical Music
audience. All my music should be of interest to the non-concert going
public.
AmbiEntrance: What does the future hold for the music of Larry Kucharz? Any special projects planned?
Kucharz: Well, I'm looking at the old 70's works and trying some new things with those
very minimal ideas. I'm planning a techno CD. I'm also planning of
releasing a CD of my multi tracked text work - works with words which were
an important part of my 70's output.
AmbiEntrance: Thanks for speaking with us, Larry. Keep in touch and best wishes in the coming years.
Kucharz: Thank you for the opportunity to address your web visitors!
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