How to cope with a stylistic collocation of Elodie Lauten’s creativity without recurring to inaccurate terms such as “post-minimalist”? Not an easy task – exactly like establishing the actual depth of her compositions, which intermittently appear several tads shallower than the early leaders of that area’s preeminent output. Yet they hold a distinctiveness that renders them substantial, their light welterweight façade notwithstanding.
The first CD of this double set contains two long out of print LPs from 1983 and 1984, Piano Works and Concerto For Piano And Orchestral Memory. The second disc features a protracted meditation called “Variations On The Orange Cycle”, from 1991, and a bad-sounding but fascinating live tape of “Sonate Modale” from a 1985 exhibition at Toronto’s Music Gallery. Starting from the latter pieces, it’s here that La Monte Young’s influence on his former pupil becomes pretty evident, even if the rather comfortable melodic range through which Lauten improvises is still quite distant from the old master’s just intonation-elicited arcane resonances. The music does soothe, though, and no complaints can be filed against its acoustic respectability (mildly endangered by a substratum of CMI Fairlight emissions in “Sonate”).
Apropos of this, there’s no doubt that the authentic cunningness of this lady lies instead in the uncanny potion of insistent pianistic figurations and disconcerting backgrounds (mostly consisting of abstract electronics, natural echoes, snippets of radio and television and fragments of Peter Zummo and Arthur Russell’s instrumental interaction) of the above mentioned previous albums. Stimulated by those extraneous and somewhat unbalancing presences, the repetitive doggedness of the composer’s geometry loses its mask of quasi-ordinariness, setting the overall sound apart in a precisely contoured niche of late XX century’s avant-garde. A mixture of tense hospitableness and almost unnatural entrancement that grows in our scale of values with each subsequent spin, provided that you forget about useless comparisons to the likes of Steve Reich, whose work is as far from Lauten’s as a mirage from a dehydrated desert wanderer.
MASSIMO RICCI. TOUCHING EXTREMES. 