If all Lansky had done was transfer speech patterns to music, it might have been an interesting experiment like Steve Reich’s Come Out, Charles Dodge’s Speech Songs, or, even more elaborately, Reich’s The Cave, which likewise draws all its melodies and rhythms from recorded speech. But Conversation Pieces leaves conceptualism far behind. All those algorithms are diffracted through Lansky’s own sense of tonal harmony; a lot more intrinsically musical composition goes into these pieces than I’ve made evident in my description so far. The intricate patterns of speech are the base material the music starts with, but the elegant, detailed surface colorization is all done by hand.
All of which gives Conversation Pieces, for me, something of an ambient feeling—in fact, it’s the most eloquent ambient disc since Brian Eno’s heyday. But Lansky disagrees with me about the ambient part. He feels that if you let your attention wander while you’re listening, it doesn’t make as much sense. It’s less open to debate that Lansky is about the only classically trained composer besides Robert Ashley who knows how to put out a compact disc as an artistic end-in-itself. Computer music’s most optimistic promises are completely fulfilled here in a disc so richly textured and lovely that I’d recommend it to anyone.
