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Larry Kucharz Larry Kucharz from New York is an old musical acquaintance of mine, and I’ve been quite attracted to his sound art from the beginning. There’s always been something peculiarly original about his music, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that it was the craftsmanlike simplicity with which he constructed artistic complexity; not a bewildering intricacy, but a cathedral-like spatiality through which his sounding light would fall in canons and motets, in a figurative musical sense. In his intricate simplicity you hear human beings like rhythms through the rooms; like varying densities in space; like light fanning out in the angles of a prism. Larry Kucharz’s persistent sound world works like one of those Buddhist mantras, which serve as vehicles that carry you ever deeper into the significance of life; into what’s left when all the show is peeled away. Just stay with it; remain in the center of your gravity, and you will unveil musical detail you’d think impossible, in those greater sweeps across the pattern fields: nuance, richness, clean inspiration, sun resting on flat rock while everything else seems to vibrate. A Lapland hike for a fortnight will do you the same, into secret lights and shades of the rock desert valleys of Unna Reaiddávággi and Sielmávággi and your mind. I am usually opposed to beat in contemporary music, which I feel is put there, most of the time, as a concession to people who otherwise cannot cope, i.e., beat as a cliché. Larry Kucharz, on the other hand, so clearly applies beat within a very different mindset. He is about the only modern avant-garde composer who actually can handle beat without veering off on the cheap side, so when he sometimes does use beat, I am not irritated. He keeps even that hazard on track; neat, clean, clear-cut, in a mantra mode and mood! Most of his soaring stratosphere flybys on Blue Drawings and Text is a kind of Atlantis music, though, spiritually or philosophically, in a slow, oceanic swell from the stars; wavelengths on the cosmic sea, emanating from a City of Sentient Beings and their guardian angels descended deep in space and time. I download a NASA shot of the Andromeda Galaxy and apply it as a desktop picture while I fill the room with one of the clearest inter-galactic elf dreams of Larry Kucharz’s tintinnabulation deep space star-bell spells. Kucharz’s clarity is heartbreaking, making you feel unworthy or too alloyed, too mixed-up, too material – for all this brutally clean cathedral sonority, this tolling everness, with its too bright light right in your head. Absolutely wonderful! I’m listening to track 7, 1979, no. 03A, when observing this – but it could be claimed for much of Larry Kucharz’s oeuvre, from the sentient being point of view. A final observation on the first seven pieces on this CD – I hope nobody gets too offended – is that certain aspects of this intense, yet withheld and wildly controlled passion, feels like trying to have an orgasm with your clothes on… The loftiness of the beginning of track 8 – winterfall, mix 40 – is hallucinatory, all those voices emerging in your head like a gang of black jackdaws flying up and fluttering around a church tower in some small town of anonymity. Yes, these giddy vocal Kucharz jackdaws swarm around the tower on a backdrop of an absolutely blue sky, which is illustrated with the composer’s ascetic and antiseptic tonalities. There are several of Kucharz’s text pieces on this CD, collected on the latter part of it, giving me a new insight into his artistic vision. He says about these works: “In the 1970s I created a modular text,.. interchangeable word modules,.. permutational modules,.. which are projected into a temporal structure,… word modules,.. strung together to produce a durational value,…” In Winterfall, track 8, the words that soar about on the backdrop of the Rigpa clarity of Kucharz’s steel-transparent everness sonorities (sounds hard and definite as steel; transparent and lofty as the original Mind of Existence and Non-Existence: the primordial, nondual awareness; the innermost nature of the mind) are leaves / fading / flowing / bright / breeze / stream / sun / winterfall / colors / brisk / last / day. On track no. 8, 1976 #24 soundless, the words are a few more, and treated in another way, each word standing out individually and clearly, allotted a few widening echoes, like the circular waves spreading on a puddle when you throw a pebble. The sonorities that Kucharz uses here are old-fashioned electronic “echo-chamber” standing waves of a darker kind, which you often heard in the early studios of the 1950s or -60s. Here you do not get the impression of Rigpa and clarity, but rather of congested conditions in t he sky; rainy clouds and people huddling in rain coats, under umbrellas – but Kucharz still achieves a meditative atmosphere with the words soundless / noiseless / stillness / quiet / silence / lull / peace / hush / secluded / unfrequented / abandoned / solitary / calm / eternal / unending / endless / inactivity / restful / sleep / repose / perpetual / ceaseless / timeless / time / constant / continual / permanent / infinite” I recall another work, which utilizes a series of especially chosen – or randomly chosen? – words, to achieve a certain, compositional effect. That work is called For Julian, and was written by Alvin Curran. I regard that work as one of Curran’s very best works, and still I haven’t been able to obtain a decent copy of it. The only copy I have is one I made from a radio broadcast in Sweden early 1989, when the broadcasting situation wasn’t optimal. The piece was the awarded the Ars Acoustica award of 1988, and thus broadcast in all the participating countries. I’ve even talked to Curran about this work, but it seems impossible to find a copy, even though it ought to be out there somewhere, having won the first prize, even, in 1988. I also talked to Klaus Schöning at the WDR, who hosted the Ars Acoustica event, but he said – in 1990 – that For Julian wouldn’t be published in the near future… I still cannot find it! And I regard it as Alvin Curran’s best work! I composed a work myself, using a method of gathering words, amassing them and rendering them a compositional manner. In my work as a crime investigator I found an old law from 1736 which still is in place in the Swedish law, pertaining to the regulations around your bees, if they should happen to swarm in somebody else’s woods. You can read all about the composition at: http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco22/iln/lag.html (It’s quite entertaining!) In addition, you can listen to it and download it for free from: http://www.lastfm.se/music/Ingvar+Loco+Nordin/Lagboekeri+Volume+1 Excuse me for this sizeable roundabout in this review of Larry Kucharz’s latest sonic adventure, but it was his artistry that made me make the associations! The third text piece on Kucharz’s CD is track 10; bar scenes, with the words lights / staring / drinking / music / man / bar / talking / lonely / waiting / crowd / woman / desperate – which brings some quirky humor into the composition as well! The last work on the CD is track 11, city street scenes II mix 40, which gears up in a distant murmur, with smaller, crisp sounds closing in together with a crowd of voices and a scarce beat, finally giving me a kind of Shaft sense! Simultaneously, city street scenes II also reminds me of Paul Lansky’s Idle Chatter, in which he used a kind of electronic, synthetic word flow without recognizable meaning. Even though Kucharz uses real people and real words, he clutters them beyond much recognition – except on some occasions –, making the Lansky connection viable. The beat sometimes get real deep; clay deep, humus dark, while the flow and dance of male voices takes on the illusion of a veil, or a bull fighter’s cloth dancing in front of the eyes of the animal. Outrageous! Wonderful! Quite clearly, Larry Kucharz has deepened his art considerably over the years, yet managed to retain a style and an atmosphere, which truly belongs to him and no one else. This is a consistency that I admire and support, and which has lead Larry Kucharz’s art further and further into sonic brilliance.
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