With Lips the liminal chroniclers of Unseen Worlds excavate the archive of Daniel Lentz, doling out a series of works most of which date from his first period of living in California, between 1968 and 1991 when he decamped for Arizona and the Sonoran Desert. As a student at Brandeis University in the mid-sixties, Lentz first began performing theatre pieces on live electronics, influenced by the experimental musician Alvin Lucier whose ‘brain wave’ composition Music for Solo Performer had recently premiered at the Rose Art Museum on campus. In that piece electrodes attached to Lucier’s head picked up on alpha waves from his mind in a state of rest, whose low-frequency rhythms were amplified and filtered before being routed through a series of loudspeakers attached to various percussive instruments.
After completing a Fulbright Fellowship in electronic music in Stockholm, the nascent composer returned to the United States and accepted a visiting lectureship at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Soon after his arrival he established the California Time Machine as a four-piece ensemble, whose conceptual performances sometimes veered towards the political and showed his newfound penchant for wine, with experiments in tape delay accompanied by the rubbing and clinking of crystal goblets. Missa Umbrarum or the ‘Mass of shadows’ would become his best known work from this period in the early seventies as Lentz devised a ‘music in the state of becoming’, but Song(s) of the Sirens from the same year serves as both an encapsulation of his prior efforts and an augur of the fruits to come, through its use of looped voices and fragmented phonemes culled from the Homeric text. String glissandos and softly murmured labial solicitations give the piece its shimmering aqueous quality, with Lentz later identifying Song(s) of the Sirens as his first salvo in a decade-long recuperation of romanticism.
Tim Rutherford-Johnson in his liner notes to Lips writes that Song(s) of the Sirens contained the seeds of what Lentz’s music became across the seventies and eighties, ‘looped vocals, a text broken into isolated syllables, a stratified musical texture of apparently independent layers, and a sun-kissed harmonic language positioned somewhere between the lounge bar and the ocean’. Straying further from the academy, Lentz could indulge his interest in choral music with San Andreas Fault, a group which initially comprised eight singers who also whistled and played wine glasses, with later iterations revolving around singing keyboardists while adding percussive elements and live electronics.
North American Eclipse or O-ke-wa was a defining piece for the San Andreas Fault, scored for multiple voices, drums, bone rasps and bells, with the performers encircling the audience in an echo of the death ceremonies carried out by the Seneca people of the Great Lakes. With North American Eclipse the composer – who claims partial Seneca heritage and also briefly embraced Catholicism – could elaborate his sense of ritual, with stretched notes and an accumulation of syllables creating a wash of melodic and harmonic shapes. The San Andreas Fault carried Missa Umbrarum and North American Eclipse along with them as they took in the cathedrals and art galleries of Europe across a couple of mid-seventies tours.
Cutting back and forth in time, the compilation Lips shows the pervasive influence of California on the music Lentz produced between the late sixties and the turn of the nineties, from indigenous creation narratives and laments to siren songs gazing out across the Pacific Ocean, and from an evocation of the jumbled chaos of Los Angeles highways and radio stations to a six-part requiem for a close friend. The latter piece was written in memory of Wolfgang Stoerchle, who along with Lentz’s lifelong friend the minimalist composer Harold Budd had been an extended member of the California Time Machine before dying in a car accident in 1976 at the age of 32.
Primarily a visual artist who could neither play an instrument nor read music, Stoerchle had been at least partly responsible for the early compositional approach of Lentz, who adopted his wine glasses and fractured phonemes as a sort of workaround to accommodate the abilities of his friend. His requiem, styled as a suite of songs ‘in a medieval manner’, adapts sections of the Requiem Mass from the ‘Requiem aeternam’ of the Introit to the ‘Kyrie eleison’ to the ‘Dies Irae’ with its ‘Liber scriptus’, ‘Recordare’ and ‘Lacrimosa’, pulling the long history of monophonic plainsong out of the tenebrous gloom through wine glasses, kalimbas and harps which froth and splash in iridescent cascades and jangle like the knocking of sea shells, gleaming and lustrous, romantic and languorous with the healing balm of a chanteuse.
The coursing and threnodial North American Eclipse finds its babbling counterpart in Uitoto from 1980, with its layered open-fifth piano arpeggios and cooing vocals. It was in 1982 that Lentz moved from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, where he formed the Daniel Lentz Ensemble, his most enduring and oft recorded group. Featuring Jessica Lowe and Susan James on vocals with Brad Ellis, David Kuehn and Wayne Jones on keys, with the Daniel Lentz Ensemble the composer found himself compelled by the rush of the freeway and fledgeling MIDI technology with its array of sampled sounds.
While his previous works might be redolent of a Reichian repetition or the dramaturgy of Music in Similar Motion by Philip Glass, the Stephen Sondheim musical Pacific Overtures with its parallel fourths or the Beach Boys by way of Brian Wilson in his sandbox on the defining Van Dyke Parks collaboration ‘Surf’s Up’, the stirring Talk Radio from 1989 is a cut-up as Lentz employs snatches of classical music over a silt-like bed of polyrhythmic hand percussion, with street sirens, trilling traffic notices, blowy reeds and a mellifluous recitation of weather reports, a collage of the period before his Arizona frame of mind proved darker, a slow burgeoning of desert soundscapes.
