Blue Drawings and Text (AL)
by: Alan Lockett
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Larry Kucharz is an electronic composer who operates across Modern Classical, Experimental, and Ambient genres. Kucharz appears to have been converted from classical/minimalism to synthesizer-based works in the late 70s, swayed by the instrument’s facility for easy layering of tones. Since then he has produced a succession of low profile releases on his own International Audiochrome label, with designations like “electrochoral” and later “electrotechno”. Kucharz composes within a deliberately limited timbral spectrum, aiming at foregrounding the play and interplay of spare melodic lines, sometimes implicating rhythmic structures. Kucharz captures some of the essence of his work thus in an interview: “In the mid ’70s I came out with my signature style of sound and silence used as a formal device. I never got into the noodling and doodling of the Glass/Reich stuff. My work was very austere. I was trying to create a sonic Mondrian or... better yet for those early works... an acoustic Ad Reinhardt. The works were repeated chords and silence. For a while I only used the same chord just to magnify the formal aspect of the music.”
This will prepare listeners for what to expect from Blue Drawings and Text - in part a kind sonic analogue of Mondrianesque minimalism and Reinhardtian reductionism, realised in shades of ambient blue. The first six tracks - the Blue Drawings pieces - are introspective ambient synthesizer pieces with a certain spartan quality that favours formalism over the sensations of tone. Soft, subtly shifting textures draw themselves out in stylistic terrain recalling Eno in their blithe ambiguous drifting demeanour. Each of the tracks are rather prosaically titled and numbered (cf. Rothko paintings), which seems to be a deliberate distancing effect on the part of Kucharz, suggesting artefact or exhibit. And indeed the majority of pieces have a somewhat studied feel, as if they were small sonic research projects, investigating peripheral listening. That said, this section of the assemblage, along with the seventh track, “1979 no. 03a”, gradually works its spell on the listener, yielding considerable engagement, as long sustains arc and tilt across a flat soundplain.
The jury is out here, however, on the Text section, comprising tracks 8-11. These pieces have their origins in a ’70s experiment using words as the units of sound. Kucharz volunteers: “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,…”. The fact is that the vocal-led sonorities deployed by Kucharz come across like retro-sounding throwbacks to the early self-consciously effected studio experiments of the ’50s/’60s. The Text pieces give off the feeling of an artist trawling through his archives, and pulling out some of his more esoteric back catalogue. It serves to remind that ‘experimental’ work may result in failed hypotheses. Then again, data are open to interpretation, and conclusions may differ according to the researcher’s perspective. While acknowledging variability of response to such material, the listener must in the end trust the judgment of his own ears, and the dubious musical merit of these pieces, along with their lack of consonance with those preceding, means that Blue Drawing and Text overall strikes as a decidedly mixed bag. (AL)