Larry Kucharz (1946) manages his record label International Audichrome, Inc., out of Rye, New York. In his studio outfit a transcendental sound world materializes, taking ever-changing shapes, as the mood slowly rolls over and takes on a different pitch, a different shade of blue…

He calls his works ”electrocomputer music” – a term which confuses me somewhat. I suppose he works with some kind of digital synthesizer. Anyhow, the interesting thing about Larry Kucharz is his approach to the sound, which I dare call unprejudiced, in the sense that he doesn’t dodge the appearent risk of being mocked as ”populistic” or ”shallow”, considering the way he – in a seemingly laxed mood – applies strokes of pitch and duration much the same way a painter tries out simplistic ideas on canvas with harmonic strokes of the brush. However, working with simple methods is the hardest thing an artist of any kind can venture into, and few succeeds– but Mr Kucharz does!

Larry Kucharz grew up in Chicago, where he studied piano and theory at the Chicago and American Conservatories of Music. He became a doctor at Northwestern University. Then comes an interesting and probably very important note in his antecedentia; studies with Morton Feldman!
Feldman, who a few decades ago hardly was known outside of a small circle of artists of different disciplines around John Cage, Christian Wolff, David Tudor and Earle Brown, later became widely acclaimed for his unprecedented approach towards the expression of tones, in an array of works so long that the concept of duration had to be redefined, in extended works without melody line, in barren, transparent expanses of pitch and metrics. Time has caught up with the music of Morton Feldman, and record companies are competing at releasing new Feldman-CDs, the most successful ones being Hat Art and Mode.

While I listen to track number 9 on Larry Kucharz's CD ”DigiChoral Blue Portraits” – a piece of more than 18 minutes from 1978 called ”Leonin Blue” – it is obvious to me that the sounds I hear couldn’t have existed without Morton Feldman, and possibly this music is directly inspired by the teachings of Mr Feldman. These sounds are Feldmanesque! I find the mood and the stratifying of layers especially reminiscent of Feldman’s ”For Samuel Beckett” – especially the version played by The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Jonas Dominique in a broadcast from Studio 2, the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation, Stockholm, on 23d September 1988; a broadcast that I unsuccessfully have tried to convince the Radio to release on CD. The next best version is to be found on a CD (NPD 85506) from Newport Classics, with San Francisco Contemporary Players under Stephen Mosko, released in 1991. If indeed the impulse came from Feldman, conciously or not, Larry Kucharz has successfully and with sensitive intuition, made good use of the inspiration. I’ve had ”Leonin Blue” on repeat for half a day now, and I find myself completely at rest in this vast space of mind, floating in a clear and unblurred expanse, where thoughts are crystal clear, and feelings pure and free of longing and desire. Somewhere in this free-floating awareness there is a streak, though, of atmospheres from Tarkovsky movies like ”Stalker” – something lurking, something that you cannot grasp, as you cannot grasp the divine, since Man, according to the Bible, was shaped in a fashion a little lower than angels.
I can also sense some connections in this music with fore-runners like Brian Eno (”Possible Musics” and ”Discreet Music”), and also with more modern releases like ”The Shape of Solitude” by Vidna Obmana and Serge Devadder, but in the end this is the individual expression of Larry Kucharz, and it surely exists in it’s own artistic right! Sounds to live with!

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